Unlock the world of FinTech innovation with Roger Furrer and Jean-Philippe Bersier from ERI as they share their frontline insights on the OLYMPIC Banking System and more. As key players in the FinTech scene, Roger oversees ERI's operations in the German and Italian-speaking regions of Switzerland, while Jean-Philippe, with his long tenure since 2002, leads sales and marketing from Geneva with a truly global perspective. Their deep dive into the complexities of private banking and wealth management illuminates the industry's evolution and ERI's role in shaping financial technology across continents.
Our conversation with the ERI experts takes you behind the scenes of the financial markets, revealing how a core banking engine meets the sophisticated demands of various client bases worldwide. Roger and Jean-Philippe discuss the customization required to cater to Asia's complex financial products, Europe's diverse private banking needs, and the efficiency necessary for high-volume retail banking. They also touch upon ERI's unique client support model and the vital role of local partnerships in maintaining robust banking systems. Join us for a fascinating exploration into the strategies that underpin success in the dynamic realm of FinTech and banking.
Thank you for tuning into our podcast about global trends in the FinTech industry.
Check out our podcast channel.
Learn more about The Connector.
Follow us on LinkedIn.
Cheers
Koen Vanderhoydonk
koen.vanderhoydonk@jointheconnector.com
#FinTech #RegTech #Scaleup #WealthTech
Unlock the world of FinTech innovation with Roger Furrer and Jean-Philippe Bersier from ERI as they share their frontline insights on the OLYMPIC Banking System and more. As key players in the FinTech scene, Roger oversees ERI's operations in the German and Italian-speaking regions of Switzerland, while Jean-Philippe, with his long tenure since 2002, leads sales and marketing from Geneva with a truly global perspective. Their deep dive into the complexities of private banking and wealth management illuminates the industry's evolution and ERI's role in shaping financial technology across continents.
Our conversation with the ERI experts takes you behind the scenes of the financial markets, revealing how a core banking engine meets the sophisticated demands of various client bases worldwide. Roger and Jean-Philippe discuss the customization required to cater to Asia's complex financial products, Europe's diverse private banking needs, and the efficiency necessary for high-volume retail banking. They also touch upon ERI's unique client support model and the vital role of local partnerships in maintaining robust banking systems. Join us for a fascinating exploration into the strategies that underpin success in the dynamic realm of FinTech and banking.
Thank you for tuning into our podcast about global trends in the FinTech industry.
Check out our podcast channel.
Learn more about The Connector.
Follow us on LinkedIn.
Cheers
Koen Vanderhoydonk
koen.vanderhoydonk@jointheconnector.com
#FinTech #RegTech #Scaleup #WealthTech
Introduction
Welcome to the connector podcast, an ongoing conversation connecting fintechs banks and regulators worldwide. Join CEO and founder Koen Vanderhoydonk as you learn more about the latest available trends and solutions in the markets.
Koen Vanderhoydonk
Welcome to another connector podcast episode from Switzerland Swiss wealth tech life and I've got with me, Roger and Jean-Philppe from ERI. Can you please introduce yourself and the company? Maybe starting with Roger.
Roger Furrer
Hi, Welcome. Nice to meet you. myself. I'm Roger Furrer. I'm the managing director of ERI in Zurich. I'm responsible for the German speaking area and the Italian speaking area in Switzerland.
Koen Vanderhoydonk
Welcome welcome.
Jean-Philippe Bersier
Jean-Philippe, I'm the director for sales and marketing. I'm based in Geneva and working for the company since 2002. now a long time, I think Roger is as well in the company for many, many years. I supervise the sales for the global company, so we have offices across all Europe and in Asia. So in Switzerland, we have Geneva, 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 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 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 size, retail banking, commercial banking, fund administration. So we cover now a large chunk of the financial sector. But to be to be honest, we are really strong and very expert in private banking and wealth management. That's where we are mainly.
Koen Vanderhoydonk
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,
Jean-Philippe Bersier
they are many differences. But the challenge for us is to serve all those differences with one and only product, it will be just impossible from a cost perspective to develop system for different regions. So we have one core banking engine, which is highly parameterisable. 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 client wants. If you go to other segments, such as the retail banking, it's much more simple product, but they have to be processed extremely efficiently because of the volume. And so this is the major impact that we feel in building our products to serve different geographies in different markets.
Koen Vanderhoydonk
Well, one thing I think they have all in common, and that's, it's because it needs to be installed. It needs to be implemented to maintain and support it. And I'm very curious to know, what's the model that ERI applies to its clients.
Roger Furrer
It depends about the market where we are. So we have three development centers in Geneva, where we have the main development center, then we have Luxembourg, and we have Paris, from where we cover as well the African part of our client base. What we do is the maintenance. Of course of our product. As Jean Phillip mentioned, we have just one one version of our core banking system, and that's why we make the maintenance in house as well as the development everything is in house for the project approach. Of course, for the support, we have a lot of parts worldwide, when we go to the different kinds of market where the client stays, we have some partners, which help us as well to do the local support when they need it
Koen Vanderhoydonk
on place, which makes sense because the 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, its regulations, and your core banking system also touches upon regulation. So how do you deal with that sort of regulations? Yeah, in the system.
Speaker 1
So at the moment, we have clients in more than 60 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 working with partners together, which help us, of course, to make the different reports necessary to the national banks, to the regulatory departments, and the companies, which is necessary to do. So we prepare all the data for the banks and deliver them the data's so they can make a report. And
Koen Vanderhoydonk
when it makes sense, maybe
Jean-Philippe Bersier
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 our 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. And so it means it has a lot to do with the rules that we're implementing in the product itself. Well,
Koen Vanderhoydonk
I guess it's shortly comes back to your flexibility that you mentioned earlier, to be flexible and modular in your approach. And talking about modular, I think, modular slash core banking systems. I guess a lot of people would think about clouds, because there's a lot of cloud providers nowadays. Nowadays, you're in the market for a long time. So how does that look like on your end, how was the transition being made from a standard system into probably more digital transformation, but in the own company, and within and towards the bank, the customers?
Jean-Philippe Bersier
Yeah, in terms of product, 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 Banking System from the big public cloud providers. I don't want to name them, but you know, all of them. And 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, you know, moving towards the cloud, is flexibility possibly cost savings, if you use it smart, and the possibility to use every asset that the cloud can provide. And we were talking about, you know, artificial intelligence, machine learning Gen AI, 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 this capability in house would spend fortune, as opposed to something which is a commodity in our mall, or in the cloud, and banks are willing to be ready to use that the day they want to use, they are not necessarily ready today, because everybody speaks about those topics, but who really use them everyday in production to serve the clients. That's not very few at the moment, but 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, different geographies as well.
Koen Vanderhoydonk
And I think you now focused a bit on the more technical side, on clouds, but 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?
Jean-Philippe Bersier
So we have built our own capabilities in that area. Of course, from a design perspective, OLYMPIC Bnaking System 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 that Client Onboarding, digital onboarding, digital banking, so, you know, delivering very sophisticated platform for the clients, or having the capability to integrate their own FinTech solution or whatever, into the system. So the main challenges is really to deliver what the clients are really willing. And as mentioned this morning, we are not developing solutions that are not, you know, 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
Speaker 1
add some comments, 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 API's to our system. And as well, we developed our API's as well to transport our data's to third party systems are both ways. Yeah, both ways. And this gives the good way and to the to the client as well to make the digital transformation.
Koen Vanderhoydonk
Well, today, we have a wealth tech event. And I'm very pleased to have two 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 areas OLYMPIC Banking System, being accommodating this trend?
Jean-Philippe Bersier
While there are many topics that are hot topics in the press, of course, generative AI is 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 this
Koen Vanderhoydonk
technology, so you're educating a little bit, or helping them to try
Jean-Philippe Bersier
solutions to generate this, you know, starting 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 technologies 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. And, you know, by just using them every day, we tend to generalize those kinds 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.
Koen Vanderhoydonk
Potentially, do you also have a particular trend that you see,
Speaker 1
for me is the Omni opti channel part that is very common. So we get often the question from our clients, how we can connect the different client base to our systems means from high net worth individuals till to the retail customers, and so we have to deliver different kinds of channels, which I can communicate with, with our systems or with the bank. And so we assistance, for the banks. And of course, the normal way like mobile banking with which they can wire secure email directly communicate it live with the relationship managers. And so this is one of the most topic which is now to implement in the bank's different ways of the Omni opti channels. Makes
Koen Vanderhoydonk
a lot of sense. And you hear very often the same trends. Super interesting conversation. Unfortunately we already at the end, but before I leave the audience, just like that, I'd like to ask you how people can contact you if they want to continue the conversation. Where did they go?
Jean-Philippe Bersier
Well, it's very simple. We have a beautiful website named OLYMPIC Banking System .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 standards. Thank you very much for for the speech for the stock this morning. Thank you, Raji to join me for that. Thank you very much. And, yeah, enjoy the rest of the day. Thank
Koen Vanderhoydonk
you guys. And thank you also to the audience for staying tuned and more news will come from the Swiss Wealth Tech life conference. Thank you very much. Thank you.
Introduction
Thanks for listening to another episode of the connected podcast. To connect and keep up to date with all the latest, head over to www dot join. They're connected.com Or hit subscribe via your podcast streaming platform.
Transcribed by https://otter.ai