FINTECH FOCUS: LEGACY & PARTNERSHIP
Striking a balance Striking Legacy relationships and innovative technology, infrastructure and front-end services, uni- and multi-banking... incumbent institutions must weigh up all these and more, as Dennis de Weerdt and Kerstin Montiegel from Deutsche Bank discuss with ProgressSoft’s Carole Elias For decades, incumbent banks have provided a regulated, safe environment for a business to operate in. And, as the complexity and geographic reach of a business increased, it often resulted in the corporate treasury managing not just a single but several banking relationships.
Each aware that there was more than one partner in this marriage, institutions hunkered down on getting ever closer and more dependable. But, while critically important, that steadfastness will not, in itself, be enough in future, according to Dennis de Weerdt, Deutsche Bank’s global of client service, implementations and client connectivity products. In his view, institutions like his own must offer clients value-added digital services (with real-time
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as standard) that are multi-bank by design. That doesn’t just help solve a headache for the client, but, particularly in the area of payment fraud, it is also very much in the interest of the financial institution offering the technology. In March this year, Deutsche Bank entered a strategic partnership with Treasury Intelligence Solutions (TIS) to develop and distribute multi-bank services for corporate treasury and finance. Their first focus is on providing an innovative payment fraud prevention plug-in, using TIS’ Cloud platform and leveraging the bank’s long-established expertise in keeping client money safe. With payment fraud becoming a major issue for CFOs and finance departments, the software service will extend beyond the payment data of individual customers to
mutualise the knowledge of all corporates using the service, while the shared data remains anonymised. The regtech solution will help improve the detection of potential fraud, before the payment instruction even leaves a client’s system – thereby ticking de Weerdt’s two essential requirements for corporate banking solutions of the future: that they add value to the client’s business by embracing the idea of multiple, concurrent banking partnerships. “Multi-bank solutions are the key things that corporates are looking for,” he explains, adding that it doesn’t mean CFOs value the personal relationship they have with any one bank less. “They would still like to have core advisory and value-add conversations on a person-by-person basis. That’s something that will continue to exist, in my view,” says de Weerdt. www.fintechf.com