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The Connector Podcast - Revolutionizing Cash Management: The Open Banking Solutions of Exthand with Jean-Gabriel and Andrew
Have you ever wondered how cutting-edge technology can transform the financial landscape? In this episode of the Connector podcast, we bring you an exclusive conversation with Jean-Gabriel and Andrew from Exthand. They unravel the fascinating story of their company’s rise from its inception in 2018 to becoming a pioneer in open banking solutions. Jean-Gabriel sheds light on their unique customer-operated cloud solution, ensuring top-notch data security and privacy. Andrew shares compelling client success stories, including collaborations with Treasury Intelligence Solutions and Swave, showcasing how Exthand's technology revolutionises cash management and contributes to local economies.
Explore the intricacies of data standardization in open banking as Andrew takes us through the technological challenges and innovative solutions Exthand offers. With connections to over 2,300 banks, Exthand’s role in maintaining consistent and valuable data is pivotal. We discuss the broad applicability of their customizable solutions across various industries and their ambitious plans for global expansion into key markets like the UK, Brazil, and India. Andrew also provides practical advice for FinTech enthusiasts and professionals on connecting with Exthand for infrastructure needs. Join us for an insightful episode packed with expert knowledge and future-forward visions in FinTech.
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Koen Vanderhoydonk
koen.vanderhoydonk@jointheconnector.com
#FinTech #RegTech #Scaleup #WealthTech
Welcome to the Connector podcast, an ongoing conversation connecting fintechs, banks and regulators worldwide. Join CEO and founder Cohen van der Hooydonk as you learn more about the latest available trends and solutions in the markets.
Speaker 2:Welcome to another podcast of the Connector, and today I got with me two guests, jean-gabriel and Andrew, both from Extant. Can you please introduce yourselves?
Speaker 3:Yeah, I guess I'll go first. So, hi, I am Andrew. I am the Chief Commercial Officer of Extant. This week was actually my two years anniversary at the company. Congratulations, thank you so much. Thank you so much. And yeah, I'm responsible for all things. Sales partnerships, go to market, you name it all of the different sales hats a person can wear. I'm wearing them all right now.
Speaker 4:All right, and, jean-gabriel, I am Jean-Gabriel. I'm the CEO and co-founder of Extend.
Speaker 2:Nice. Can you tell us a little bit more about Extend and the story?
Speaker 4:So the story of Extend started when we were 13 years old my co-founder and myself when we started working and starting developing together. But we created the company in 2018 after being freelance for years for startups and fintechs in Belgium, and that's the work for fintechs in Belgium which brings us to the open banking, and the story of open banking was very interesting, so we jumped into it and we found a way to create a product which is quite amazing and unique worldwide.
Speaker 2:So, yeah, it's a funny journey for myself and my team, but now we all want to know what the product is about. Jo Gabriel, you make it so mystical, sorry.
Speaker 4:So it's an open banking product. So we connect to the banks and we aggregate data from the banks and we allow app developers, software developers, to connect to the banks through our tool. Being said that, our tool is quite unique because it might run inside the cloud of the customer and not only in a SaaS platform. So we have two solutions and that makes the product quite unique.
Speaker 2:Can you elaborate a little bit more on that, because it sounds very exciting.
Speaker 4:Yeah, if you have the license 708 to be able to connect to the banks, you can run the software in your cloud, meaning that the data doesn't go or flow through the extended infrastructure, but they go directly from your cloud to the banks and vice versa. So in terms of data security, data privacy, I think it's the best solution worldwide.
Speaker 2:Sounds good, sounds good. Maybe, andrew, can you share a couple of success stories and what do you hear as feedback from the client, because Jean-Rabriel says it's amazing, but what do the clients say?
Speaker 3:Yeah, definitely cool. They say it's amazing.
Speaker 2:Yeah, they do say it's amazing.
Speaker 3:Honestly, they do say it's amazing. I'm honestly, truly blessed to be working for a company with such a good product. You know, I think, from my side, what I, what I can share about our clients which clients, and some success stories that so, first of all, like we've got zero percent of clients that have left us since day one that are very happy with, with the infrastructure we're we're giving. So basically, there's a couple of big projects we're working on and that we've accomplished in the past. So one of them we could talk about is TIS Treasury Intelligence Solutions. It's a very big treasury platform and they are using our infrastructure and technology for one of their clients, which is one of the biggest FMCG companies in the world. If I'd say their name, I think everybody would know them right.
Speaker 3:So basically, what they've asked from us is they wanted connections to, well, on one side, the European banks, which we are very apt at I mean, that's our core business, right but they also needed connections to banks in the usa.
Speaker 3:So basically, what we did is we offered, through tis management's platform, connections to these european banks. We ourselves then also created connections outside of the psd2 scope in the usa. We added that all to our infrastructure. We plugged our infrastructure into the core platform of TIS and they are the ones offering very, very sophisticated cash management, treasury management solutions and in their platform today you can pull all of your financial data from all of your bank accounts in European banks, us banks, you name it into the TIS management platform and really manage your cash positions and your treasury in, I think, today, the most optimal way possible. So that is probably one of our success stories in like the big corporate side, but we've also got some really fun projects. So I think a couple of weeks ago we have a Belgian company called Suave I don't know if you know them, coen.
Speaker 2:I heard about them because you told me.
Speaker 3:Oh yeah, that makes a lot of sense, actually. That's logic, yeah. So basically what these guys did, right, they're a company from Flanders and they're working together with, I think, like five or six big big cities here in Belgium, right, and they developed this app called Swave and you can link your own bank account through our infrastructure. Right, and they developed this app called Swave and you can link your own bank account through our infrastructure right to that application. So what this application is going to get access to, once you connect your bank account, is all of the transaction details and what you've spent money on and whatever you can think of on the finance side. So, once you link that bank account to that Swave app and you go and shop into one of these five cities I talked about, you spend money locally, you boost the local economy, you spend money in local mom and pop stores.
Speaker 3:That app will see your expenses and will see hey, andrew spent money at Starbucks, spent money at store X, store Y, whatever, right. And if then I so let's say, I went to one of these cities with my car, I Then I so, let's say, I went to one of these cities with my car. I paid my parking there with that same bank account, that the app will also know that I've paid my parking. I spent money to be there and to do some shopping there, right? So imagine, I did all my shopping, bought my Starbucks, my Burger King, all of my clothes, whatever I'm going back home.
Speaker 2:So now I know your shopping behavior also.
Speaker 3:Yeah, exactly so. Analytic companies write this down. You can hear my shopping behavior. But, in any case, imagine, like okay, you've shopped, you've parked there, you want to go back home, you pay your parking spot and you drive back home. What this Wave app will basically do is oh well, andrew shopped here in, let's say, antwerp. He parked his car, he paid for his parking, but he also boosted the local economy. You know what? We're going to give him some benefits. Thank you for boosting the local economy. Your parking is now free, so you can just drive back home and you don't have to pay any parking to go shopping to your favorite spaces. And all of this is kind of possible thanks to the infrastructure we've plugged into the Swayve app.
Speaker 2:Amazing. Allowing people to seamlessly connect their bank application or all of their financial data to this one platform. But what I was very curious about is what's the magic sauce, Especially when I speak to customers in the market or prospects in the market and I say there's 2,300 banks connected. Would you be able to tell us a little bit about the technology? What's behind?
Speaker 4:Before that you speak about magic. I think that the first magic which is occurring is not technologic. It's because you are invested into the customer solution. We are the first fans of what our customers are building. I don't know if you understood Andrew when he spoke, but he's highly motivated by what we are doing and in fact, you have to understand that everybody in the company has the same high motivation with what we are building and whatever the customer is, whoever is the customer it might be Kiriba selling to the top 40 banks in France, or it might be the guys in Flanders selling as a startup we put the same motivation and the high motivation to help them build their solution, and that's what makes our solution more unique than really the product. We have a very good product, but first of all, we have a highly motivated team which helps and wants to build the solution with the customers. So we dedicate time and we are a product company, but we are also a service company.
Speaker 4:We don't sell the services, but we put a high time to help build the best solution.
Speaker 2:Makes sense. It's not just a technical solution than anyone else could bring in the market. It's also your experience by being in the market and having lifted yourself and having also the inspiration. What I also read, it's about standardization of data.
Speaker 4:Can you?
Speaker 2:elaborate a little bit on that.
Speaker 4:Yeah, so on that side we go deeper in the technological part of the business because indeed it's the everyday life of our development team. In fact, we are connected to 2,300 banks, as you said, and we have to standardize data for all those banks. So that makes the sense of our product line. It's the fact that we are going to standardize data, understand all the data, and we do the analysis of all the data flowing in our system close to every day in fact. So all the time we receive data from the banks we do even analyze this and see if there are different new data coming in and stuff like that. So data standardization is maybe 95% of the job of some guys in the technical team, because there is a high added value for that in the business.
Speaker 2:It's comparing apples with apples. Yeah, yeah, when you look at open banking and the solution that you provide and the examples that you gave were completely different examples. So what probably for you, are the most or the best industries to be in?
Speaker 3:It's a good question, Koen. I think we've been doing a lot of testing and historically we've been selling our infrastructure to companies in, I think, 10 different industries. Honestly, so, it's been.
Speaker 3:It's been quite an adventure, let's say, to identify the types of industries or the types of companies that can really benefit the most from our technology. I mean, something we've discussed in the past a lot with Jean-Gabriel is like open banking is kind of like current, like electricity, you know, like you can power a washing machine, but you can power a PlayStation, you can power a TV, a laptop. You can power all of these things through electricity. And I think the same thing kind of goes with open banking. You know, I've talked about this revolutionary application in which you can share your bank account data and get loyalty points and get paid back for your parking and all of these things, right.
Speaker 3:But we've got really big cash management companies, treasury companies. We've got payment service right, but we've got really big cash management companies, treasury companies. We've got payment service providers, we've got credit institutions, we've got anything to do with loans, with risk management, kyc, kyb, I think these are all all in. We even have the biggest retailer of belgium that is using our technology. So there's a lot of possibilities with open banking. And I think, like how I feel is that? Um, every single. If we see, if we look at the open banking market today. Every single one of these players is kind of choosing their own niche out of these hundreds of possibilities, right? And I think, like there's going to be companies that are going to be like okay, we're open banking for credit institutions. We're going to add, like, all of these cool, awesome algorithms. They're going to like um, calculate the risk management score and all of these things, and that's really awesome, um, but then we're like but our client is the company creating those algorithms, so maybe we don't want to do the same thing as our clients, right?
Speaker 3:so what we do instead of then, like focusing on one industry, is positioning ourselves as a really low uh level service provider, so as a company that is kind of the lego of open banking, let's say with full white label, full customizability. And if you're the biggest retailer of bel or if you're like a small Flemish startup, both of these types of companies are welcome at Extend honestly as clients.
Speaker 2:Thank you for sharing that. We're almost at the end of our conversation here, so I'm wondering what are the long-term goals for Extend? How does that look like? How does the future look like?
Speaker 3:Yeah, you can start Go ahead.
Speaker 4:Yeah, the goal of Xtend is to stay a low-level service provider, so we don't want to develop services and products on top of the technology that we have, but we want to expand the technology that we have. So I would say that expansion outside of EU is one of our best wishes and it's on the top one list of what we want to do in the future. So, going in the UK, going in Brazil, in India, that's on the roadmap and that's what we plan and foresee for the company in the next two or three years yeah, definitely.
Speaker 3:And I think also what we try to avoid is building custom or things on top of our technology for like one client. But in the past weeks and months we've been working closely with all kinds of companies with a specific need around risk management and payments, around risk management and payments. And if we have like multiple players in the industry and kind of like group projects like this that we are passionate about, that are going to really solve a problem in specific industries, then we're going to build that. So today we're building a risk management API for payments. So that is like the short-term goal and I think Jean-Gabriel says it really nicely. I think the long-term goal is going to be taking over the world somehow.
Speaker 3:On that note, on that note.
Speaker 2:No, it's a very inspirational talk today. I guess a lot of the listeners would probably like to be in touch with you, so how would that work? What's the best way to get in contact with you guys? Andrew at Xtendcom Send me an email if you, if you, if you're already listening to this podcast.
Speaker 3:it means you're in some way interested in FinTech and in open banking and I think, like in in in any kind of way, that you would want to talk to me. If it's just for advice, if it is to, um, hopefully purchase our infrastructure, but, um, anything like anything, anything, uh, feel free to reach out to Andrew at xhandcom or or find me, andrew Depressed on LinkedIn or whatever. Um, otherwise, yeah, I think like probably ourin page or our website would be a good place to go to um, yeah, all right.
Speaker 2:Gentlemen, thank you very much for joining me in this podcast thank you.
Speaker 3:Thank you so much cool and it was really nice being here and thank you also to the audience and please stay tuned.
Speaker 2:More fintech news coming to you soon.
Speaker 1:Thank you very much thanks for listening to another episode of the connector podcast to connect and keep up to date to you soon. Thank you very much.