PSD2 is one of the few regulatory directives that drives to countless business discussions on the market: use cases, development strategies, business models and so on.
From the day one is was beyond how banks are going to be compliant. What we found out till today? What banks did in a year? What worked or not?
There are just a few questions that Florin Boldescu, chief digital officer at BRD Groupe Societe Generale, has tried to answer. in the case of BRD, open banking started with the launch of ContAll, a premiere for Romania.
„Our experience with „ContAll” which is the first multi-bank aggregator was a way for BRD to find out sooner if there is something else ahead of us.”
Initially, there were 5 banks using this data to BRD. Now the app has 8 national banks and one is an international bank, which is Societe Generale.
What we found out?
„The simple exposure of that is not good enough. You have to bring more value to the customer.”
„It is not the product itself just exposing data. We know that open banking is mainly and basically about data. Banks already have a lot of data. Having more data without changing anything else will not bring you too good or much on this value proposition.”
„Open banking is kind of network is not a product itself. Is not a list of use cases and you should spend a lot of time in meetings trying to choose what role I’m going to play as a bank: aggregator, distributed player or a market place, and what kind of use case. What I’m going to do first? (…)
You can’t have the full image of the network. So don’t look for it. It’s very important. Don’t try to figure out the whole business game because right now you have no clue. We don’t know.
It’s like 20 years ago when the web founders said I’m going to invent the web and two decades after there are going to be Amazon or Google. They have no idea about that. Or it’s about the founder of the mobile phone who said I’m going to invent the GSM and this object is going to dramatically change your lives. They have no idea about that.”
„Talking about open banking as a network it is natural to be partners. If you want to build an ecosystem you have to go in partnerships with the others, you have to learn to share things. You have to accept that banks are going to share the front end and the primary relationship with the customer. That’s a fact and we are already doing this, even if we are talking about Revolut, Apple Pay, Amazon or PayPal.
The question is what kind of business philosophy you have in this environment. I am going to be an active player, to create value or I am going to be passive, not participating to all of this. This is the choice for every player.”
You can find below the entire speech at the open banking event seen from a cyber security perspective, organized by NOCASH in partnership with Romanian Association of Banks and Kobil Systems on March 20th:
Banking 4.0 – „how was the experience for you”
„So many people are coming here to Bucharest, people that I see and interact on linkedin and now I get the change to meet them in person. It was like being to the Football World Cup but this was the World Cup on linkedin in payments and open banking.”
Many more interesting quotes in the video below:
