David Marongiu, COO – Indosuez Wealth Management in Europe & Jonathan Prince, Co-Founder – Finologee

The challenge

Can you describe your challenge with regards to PSD2 and how you chose to address it?

According to PSD2, banks must allow third-party providers to essentially play the roles of “middlemen”, providing new services to clients such as allowing access to account information and initiating payments. This means that bank’s clients, both individuals and corporates, can use third-party providers to manage all essential aspects of their finances. In order to work, these freshly introduced service providers must have full access to all the necessary customer information, which PSD2 ensures by insisting on open API implementation across the financial sector.

As banks, we are forced to expose our APIs which will allow third parties to get payments history, balances from accounts and execute payments. While opening APIs to a further extent is not mandatory, banks willing to provide greater access will be in a better position to implement new regulations and reap more benefits of PSD2 compliance.

As most of the Banks, complying with the revised Payment Service Directive (PSD2) has been challenging, in particular the set-up of an efficient interconnection between our systems and the outside world. As a result, we decided to look for a specialised provider that could help us to meet this challenge in a secure, efficient and rapid manner.

Which opportunities for your institution do you see stemming from PSD2 and digitalisation in general?

PSD2 creates opportunities for banks to compete as technology innovators. The key is to capture these opportunities quickly and effectively. At Indosuez Wealth Management, we believe this technological development will require us to streamline our services and upgrade client experience in order to provide them with added-value services.

Fortunately, we have an historic advantage – a deep knowledge of financial products, a large customer base and a supporting balance sheet. Our expertise paired with innovation is what’s needed to stay ahead in the game.

Nonetheless, to fully benefit from digitalisation it is important to build partnerships to deliver best results for customers. We’ve already seen some fantastic examples of partnerships in this space and, going forward, we expect the emergence of new partnerships as well as tools and services.

The solution

Why did you choose Finologee as your provider?

We chose to work with Finologee mainly because of the track record and expertise of its founders in delivering business-critical finance platforms and their previous successes.

However, while working with them, Finologee’s modern approach to build interconnection platforms while fully meeting compliance and security obligations, stood-out the most to us. Moreover, they were highly flexible and efficient, they just needed one month between the first meeting and the delivery of the actual sandbox.

The outcome

Developer’s portal

Finologee’s PSD2 for Banks product supported Indosuez Wealth Management Europe in meeting with the first imposed deadline of March 14^th 2019. Therefore, since this date, the Indosuez Developer Portal, namely a bank custom branded “access to account” portal is live. This testing facility is publicly available through the following link: https://developer.xs2a.ca-indosuez.lu/.

This environment allows third-party providers to carry out tests using sample data – as close as possible to the real data from Indosuez.

This testing facility, commonly named “Sandbox”, will help third-party providers discover and try Indosuez API’s (based on Berlin Group specifications) and to identify any issues they may have before the actual go-live of the PSD2 Platform. Besides, an additional service offered by Finologee is the continued assistance provided to third-party providers via their support team.

At this moment, Indosuez and Finologee are getting prepared for the second major PSD2 milestone, which is the effective go-live of the Platform.

Indosuez Wealth Management

Indosuez Wealth Management is the global wealth management brand of Crédit Agricole group, the world’s 13^th largest bank by Tier 1 capital (source: The Banker, July 2018).

Shaped by more than 140 years of experience helping families and entrepreneurs around the globe, Indosuez Wealth Management offers a tailored approach that enables each of its clients to manage, protect and pass on their wealth according to their specific needs. Its teams take a comprehensive view and provide expert advice and exceptional service, offering a wide range of services for the management of both personal and business assets.

Renowned for its combination of a human scale and a truly international reach, Indosuez Wealth Management has 3,150 employees in 14 countries around the world, in Europe (France, Belgium, Spain, Italy, Luxembourg, Monaco and Switzerland), Asia-Pacific (Hong Kong, Singapore and New Caledonia), the Middle East (Abu Dhabi, Dubai and Lebanon) and the Americas (Brazil, Uruguay and Miami).

With €122 billion in assets under management (at 31/12/2018), Indosuez Wealth Management group is one of the global leaders in wealth management.