The general manager of the consortium company CBI turns the spotlight on the need to push for cooperation between “traditional” actors and fintech companies. "New highly competitive arena, the key will be value-added services" 09 May 2022 Mila Cornflowers Director
Go beyond the mandatory regulatory services to push innovation to the benefit of businesses, citizens and the Public Administration. This is the new challenge facing the banking sector. A challenge that passes through the transformation of open banking into open finance and that rests on the network economy, where the success of an initiative is linked to the increase in both the number of players in the field and the growth of users in a club virtuous that determines the exponential increase in value. Liliana Fratini Passi, General Manager of Cbi and last November named "Woman in FinTech of the Year" - as part of the initiative that celebrates female talent and the value of gender diversity in the world of finance - takes stock with CorCom on future challenges and on the evolution of the scenario also and above all following the profound changes triggered by the outbreak of the Covid 19 pandemic. Fratini Passi what has really changed in these two years? The pandemic and technological innovation are significantly reshaping the habits of all of us, families and businesses, representing two important points of discontinuity with respect to the past. And among the most important changes we have seen are those concerning payments: the use of electronic methods has persistently intensified, up to a 30% increase in the number of transactions in the first three quarters of 2021 - according to recent data from the Bank of Italy - helping to reduce Italy's gap in comparison with other European countries in relation to the use of alternative instruments to cash. A figure on the CBI side, is confirmed by the doubling of the number of citizens, now at 11 million, who in the last year have used the CBILL service, which allows you to consult and pay online payment notices of companies and the Public Administration. Are we at the point of no return? Many of the habits acquired will remain, companies will continue to use digitized processes, e-commerce and smart working, with continuous and rapid innovation. So many people talk about "never normal" as every innovation achieved thanks to new technologies will be quickly overcome to aim for the next one. It is precisely the diffusion of digital technologies in the financial market that contributes to expanding the range of services offered also by new subjects compared to traditional market operators, who collect the requests of customers, especially the younger ones, for digital services. Among other things, the European institutions, which have long since grasped the evolution underway in the financial markets, are promoting various dossiers to regulate the new market and guarantee the consumer a homogeneous and safe experience of using the tools also towards the new ones. fintech entities: in particular in September 2020 the Digital Finance Package was published by the European Commission which includes strategies on digital finance and retail payments as well as a series of regulations that aim to remove the fragmentation of the digital single market for financial services, facilitate innovation through the use of innovative technologies such as blockchain, promote a common European financial data space and improve risk management. These are initiatives that reconfirm the founding elements of the directives on payment systems (PSD and PSD2) which, in encouraging the development of new forms of innovation and competition, with the prospect of offering more choice options to end consumers, introduce into the market a real segmentation of the payment chain, involving all the main players - intermediaries, customers and technological partners - and pushing the so-called “open banking”. Speaking of open banking, what's new? While the financial industry in general, and the payments market in particular, is not new to technological changes, however, what characterizes the current open banking scenario is the exponential speed of change, as well as the fact that innovative impulses come mainly from outside the sector. In this regard, it is important to highlight that open banking is not a circumscribed phenomenon but is a growing trend at an international level; to date, initiatives in this area have been launched in more than 60 countries. The relationship of traditional banks with these new players can turn from competition to the creation of broad forms of basic cooperation based on specific complementary characteristics: banks have capital and customer base, but less flexibility, while fintechs are flexible, but lack the elements of banks. These collaborative initiatives are fundamental to allow traditional banks to respond promptly to market solicitations and increasingly wide and tight international competition, as well as allow interoperability and circularity of services by creating a broad ecosystem between traditional / digital banks, fintech & tech providers. And what role can CBI be to push the transformation? In the last three years, CBI has developed, in synergy with the Authority, a pre-competitive ecosystem of open finance with the aim of facilitating the process of maximum interoperability of open banking in Italy and Europe, allowing service providers to payment to seize all the opportunities in the new regulatory framework defined by PSD2, avoiding dispersion and fragmentation as desired by the European legislator, and, at the same time, to go beyond the mandatory regulatory services, to the benefit of the final customer, businesses, citizens and the Public Administration . But to accelerate the development of Open Banking beyond compliance, advanced value-added services are required. After the launch of the Check Iban service over a year ago in support of the Public Administration and recently of corporates, CBI, thanks also to the pre-competitive aggregation work in support of the Italian financial industry, has identified a development timeline for value-added services very challenging starting from 2022. Among the services: Smart Onboarding, which allows corporations to speed up and simplify customer onboarding processes by instantly obtaining user data from the intermediaries who hold this information, in order to simplify and facilitate the user experience of the user in the onboarding process; Check Iban cross border, expansion of the Check Iban service to cross-border checks, with the possibility for participating intermediaries to act in the roles of responding and calling; Name Check to verify the correct correspondence between the name of the beneficiary of a Sct and the related Iban code. And we are working on the development of new initiatives including Advance Invoice Database, Interbank Pay by Loan, Account Status Check, Push Notification. Could the PNRR act as a driving force for further development? The NRP represents an unmissable opportunity for investments and reforms for our country to resume a path of lasting and sustainable economic growth, removing the obstacles that have blocked its development in recent years. And for the banks the possibility is outlined to exploit an important experiential heritage, based on collaboration for better competition, to transform the dynamics of the new highly competitive arena to their advantage.
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