Open banking and platform solutions: CRIF’s best practices illustrated at MoneyLIVE Nordic Banking 2019

Delving deep into hot topics such as open banking, digital identities, the personal data economy, digital payments and customer experience, the conference explored how the banking landscape is evolving into a new needs-focused business model. With insights from leading industry experts: from the largest Nordic banks, to innovative FinTechs and solution providers, this was the perfect opportunity to learn from the content-rich agenda and exchange knowledge with other players.
This is MoneyLIVE Nordic Banking, the traditional event held in autumn in the Nordics with a well-balanced mix of presentations from financial institutions and vendors. This year, thanks to its increasing market presence in the Nordics market, the organization decided to invite CRIF to share its experience in Digital Innovation and Open Banking to an audience of more than 300 people. Participants included the top players in the Nordics, including Swedbank, Nordea, SEB, DanskeBank, Nykredit, Ikano, Gjensidige and many others.

In a content-rich three days of meetings and presentations, attendees had the chance to listen to interesting panels such as “Best practices in APIs: ensuring innovation and effectiveness” or to real-life experience such as in the speech titled “Innovating for the benefit of the customer: creating seamless, digital propositions”.

Arianna Lombardo and Claudio Sangiorgi, EMEA Business Development Manager, gave a speech on how financial institutions can implement a real Digital Transformation Journey starting from their main asset: the Customer Base.

Claudio Sangiorgi shared CRIF’s vision with the audience, highlighting the importance of elements of the new paradigm which must be considered to secure future business growth for the European Financial Industry.

In particular:

- Harmonization of business needs with Regulatory Requirements and IT Trends
- Innovation Management involving all organizational areas with the aim of defining a new common language
- Exploiting pre-configured solutions to speed-up project cycles while working alongside traditional core banking system functionalities.

The presentation continued, shifting the audience’s attention from a high-level holistic view of the whole IT architecture of banks to how to exploit the individual pieces of data and existing systems to support the latest Fintech technologies, for an increasingly advanced customer experience.
To satisfy these new market expectations and sustain the growth of new credit in the age of open banking, banks and financial institutions have to completely re-think the way they use their traditional assets, initiating an in-depth change management program which involves human and technological resources, to create a more proactive, fast and data-driven organization.
The adoption of a “platform” approach may accelerate this process and can allow banks to reach new and unmet targets, such as SME Customers. Driven by the evolution in retail, they are looking for faster, more customized and specific solutions, and don’t just want to be financed. They want to be “advised”.

The case study presented by Arianna Lombardo, based on a project deployed in one of the largest European banking groups, illustrated how the partnership with CRIF enabled the bank to deliver real value to customers through the integration of an “Advisory Expert System” (AES) for SME evaluation with the existing architecture.
The AES platform interfaces completely with the bank’s core functionalities, while at the same time expands and improves the evaluation capabilities. The analysis, based on machine learning algorithms, includes internal and external data. Quantitative and qualitative information can be enriched through an application-driven interface.
As part of a more comprehensive Credit Lifecycle project, the integration of the AES with the Loan Origination Platform allowed the bank to reduce time from evaluation to disbursement and to reach significant targets in terms of efficiency (70% reduction in Time to Yes).
Moreover, the implementation of a “data lake”, which constantly feeds all credit processes, represents the point of balance between Data Governance requirements and the opportunity to incorporate innovative elements, such as data exchanged through open banking processes.

Here are some of the takeaway messages:

- Open banking reminds you that the real value is in your Existing Architecture and Customer Base
- Digital Transformation is not only a matter of smart apps, but implies a whole understanding of processes
- In order to quickly meet new market expectations, it is recommended to adopt Innovative Applications, but with a “platform” approach.