The Connector Podcast - WealthTech Live in Zürich 2024 - Delving into FinTech Innovations and Glo...

Welcome to the Connector Podcast, an ongoing conversation connecting fintechs, banks, and regulators worldwide. Join CEO and founder Koen van der Hooijdonk as you learn more about the latest available trends and solutions in the markets.

Welcome to another Connector Podcast episode from Switzerland, Swiss Wealth Tech Live, and I've got with me. Roger and Jean-Philippe from Airi. Can you please introduce yourself and the company? Maybe starting with Roger.

Hi, welcome. Nice to meet you. Myself, I'm Roger Fuhr. I'm the managing director of Airi in Zurich. I'm responsible for the German-speaking area and the Italian-speaking area here in Switzerland.

Welcome, welcome.

Jean-Philippe Bercier. So I'm the director for sales and marketing. I'm based in Geneva and working for the company since 2002. Quite some time now.

A long time. A long time.

I think Roger is as well in the company for many, many years. And well, I supervise the sales for the global company. So we have offices across all Europe and in Asia. So in Switzerland, we have Lugano and Zurich as well. We have an office in London, in Paris, a fairly big office in Luxembourg, and a distribution office as well in Singapore, covering the Asian area. We are the maker of the Olympic Banking System. So we are very well known.

Well known to a lot of people.

Yes. And a lot of people do know the product name, but they don't necessarily know the company name. So the Olympic Banking System is a widely distributed core banking system. We were born in the private banking industry. So we started really serving private banks in Geneva, Zurich, Luxembourg, Paris very, very well starting from the early '90s. And then we expanded to all the regions in Asia first, then in the Middle East and in Africa. And we expanded as well to other market segments such as retail banking, medium-sized retail banking, commercial banking, fund administration. So we cover now a large chunk of the financial sector. But to be honest, we are really strong and very expert in private banking and wealth management. That's where we are mainly.

And because it's great that you have such a wide variety of countries, what would you say are the main differences between the different countries? Are there any differences in terms of core banking platforms?

There are many differences, but the challenge for us is to serve all those differences with one and only one product. It would be just impossible from a cost perspective to develop systems for different regions. So we have one core banking engine, which is highly parameterizable. So everything we do is supposed to be driven by parameters so that we can change the behavior of the system. from one country to another one. Products, financial products might be very different. I mean, the Asian people, they love a certain number of products, fairly sophisticated. In Europe, it's a different mindset. If you serve the private banking industry, you have to be extremely sophisticated in the way you design the products for what the clients want. If you go to another segment such as the retail banking, It's much more simple products, but they have to be processed extremely efficiently because of the volume. So this is the major impact that we feel in building our products to serve different geographies and different markets.

Well, one thing I think they have all in common, and that's because it needs to be installed, it needs to be implemented, maintained, and supported. And I'm very curious to know what's the model that ERI applies to its clients?

It depends about the market where we are. So we have 3 development centers. In Geneva is our main office, which we have the main development center. Then we have Luxembourg and we have Paris, which we cover as well, the African part of our client base. This is what we do inside, is the maintenance, of course, of our product. As Jean-Philippe mentioned, we have just one version of our core banking systems, and that's why we make the maintenance in-house as well, like the development. Everything is in-house. For the project approach, of course, for the support, we have a lot of partners worldwide.

Mhm.

When we go to the different kind of market where the client stays, We have some partners which help us as well to do the support, the local support when they need it on place.

Which makes sense because a core banking system, at the end, it's the core of a bank or a financial institution. What is also at the core of a financial institution, it's regulations. And your core banking system also touches upon regulations. How do you deal with that sort of regulations in the system?

So we are at the moment, we have clients at more than 65 countries over the world. So that's really very difficult to go in a new country or to make all the regulatory developments. What we do is as well, we're working with partners together, which help us, of course, to make the different reports necessary to the national banks, to the regulatory departments and companies, which is necessary to do. So we prepare all the data between the banks and deliver them the data that they can make a proper report.

Makes sense.

Maybe to add a remark, it is really a challenge also to follow the regulation of the EU, the US regulations. So it's true that for the reporting side, we rely on partners, and that's probably the only way to do it correctly and in a timely manner. But at the same time, we have also to implement the business rules into our product. So we invest consistently and continuously in developing the Olympic banking system to support most of the new regulations that are popping up every year in Europe, in the US market, in Asia. Most of them are more or less the same. So it's always about now the investment, the investor protection. It's about transparency. So it means it has a lot to do with the rules that we're implementing in the product itself.

Well, I guess it comes back to your flexibility that you mentioned earlier, how to be flexible and modular in your approach. Talking about modular, I think modular/core banking systems, I guess a lot of people would think about cloud because there's a lot of cloud providers nowadays. You're in the market for a long time. So how does that look like on your end? How is the transition being made from a standard system into probably more digital transformation within the own company and within and towards the bank, the customers?

Yeah. In terms of product, so the Olympic banking system is ready to be installed in the cloud for many years now, and we have a number of clients that are already using and running Olympic from the big public cloud providers. I don't want to name them, but you know all of them. And I mean, the most important point is the connectivity and the open connectivity which is required today, because going to the cloud as opposed to on-prem is only one part of the equation. What banks are willing to achieve by moving towards the cloud is flexibility, is possibly cost savings—

Mm-hmm.

If you use it smart, and the possibility to use every asset that the cloud can provide. And we were talking about artificial intelligence, machine learning, GenAI. I mean, all those technologies are widely available for a very, very low cost. in the cloud.

Correct.

Any bank that would like to build those capabilities in-house would spend a fortune, as opposed to something which is a commodity now, more or less, in the cloud. And banks are willing to be ready to use that the day they want to use it. They are not necessarily ready today because everybody speaks about those topics, but who really uses them every day in production to serve the clients? That's another story.

Very few at the moment.

But it will come. It will come and they must be ready. So that's why open connectivity, API, open standards are very important. And that's something we started years and years ago. And of course, today we are ready. And that's one of the key success factors of our system in different geographies as well.

And I think you now focused a bit on the more technical side on cloud, but I also mentioned digital transformation towards the clients. How do you actually work with that? How do you bring innovative solutions for the end customers of your clients?

So, we have built our own capabilities in that area. Of course, from a design perspective, Olimpico was always a very digitized platform because it's all about automating back-office processes, etc. But we have invested since a number of years more and more into the front. So portfolio management, client onboarding, digital onboarding, digital banking. So, you know, delivering a very sophisticated platform for the clients or having the capability to integrate their own fintech solution or whatever into the system. So the main challenge is really to deliver what the clients are really willing. And as mentioned this morning, we are not developing solutions that are not discussed and conceptually tested together with our clients. So it's very important for us to deliver and to build what the clients are willing, to anticipate a little bit their needs, but really to remain very on the ground at the end of the day. So that's very important as well.

Just add some comments to Jean-Philippe. It's like, as I mentioned, is the open platform. So for the digital transformation, it's very important that we give to all our clients the possibility to connect with open APIs to our system. And as well, we developed our APIs as well to transport our data to third-party systems.

Yeah, both ways.

Yeah, both ways.

And this gives the good way to the client as well to make the digital transformation Well, today we are at a WeldTech event, and I'm very pleased to have 2 specialists in front of me. So I would like to ask the question, what do you see as a trend happening? And obviously, what do you see then as Eri, as Olimpic, accommodating this trend?

Well, there are many topics that are hot topics in the press, of course. Generative AI is one important topic. Everybody would like to understand what the providers are doing, what the clients are willing. Yes, we do things. We have a lot of people in-house that are already using those technologies. Not necessarily today to implement solutions for the clients because the clients— I think we have to anticipate a little bit the need of our clients because they don't really know exactly how they could use that. But we use those technologies. So you're educating a little bit?

Or helping them to try to—

Well, trying to propose solutions to generate this, you know, starting the dialogue to say, hey, we could do this, we could do that. So we are doing proof of concepts in different areas, such as data analysis, for example, or forecasting the behavior of a client based on the patterns of transactions, for example. Or but also internally, we are using those technologies to improve the quality of what we do every day. So the quality of the code, for example. So we can, we can run, you know, those, those technologies to, to optimize the code, to detect potential errors, potential breach of quality, etc. So that's the things we do. And surprisingly, it was very fast to implement those different technologies. We have very good people in the company. We are recruiting engineers that have that kind of capabilities.

Mm-hmm.

And, you know, By just using them every day, we tend to generalize those kind of technologies. But we have to be careful at the same time, of course, not to believe that they can solve everything. But that's a trend. That's an interesting topic. But there are many others, of course, as well.

Potentially, Roger, do you also have a particular trend that you see?

For me, it's the omni-optic channel part is very up and coming. So we get often the questions from our clients how we can connect the different client base to our systems. So it means from high net worth individuals till to the retail customers. And so we have to deliver different kind of channels which they can communicate with our systems or with the bank. And so we have chatbots which was coming in. We have virtual assistants which helps to the banks. And of course, the normal way like mobile banking and e-banking, which they can, via secure email, directly communicate with the relationship managers. And so this is one of the most topics which is now to implement in the banks, different ways of the omnioptichannels.

Makes a lot of sense. And you hear very often the same trends. Super interesting conversation. Unfortunately, we're already at the end. But before I leave the audience just like that, I'd like to ask you, where can people contact you if they want to continue the conversation? Where do they go?

Well, it's very simple. We have a beautiful website named theolympicbankingsystem.com. There's a request for a demo, contact us button. So it's very easy to contact us and we reply normally within 24 hours. So that's excellent. That's our standard. Thank you very much for this speech, for this talk this morning. Thank you, Roger, to join me for that. Thank you very much. Enjoy the rest of the day. Thank you.

Thank you, guys. And thank you also to the audience for staying tuned. And more news will come from the Swiss WellTech Live conference. Thank you very much.

Thank you.

Thank you.

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