Interview with Emir Memic, CTO at ABC TECH Group about Open Banking challenges and LEONUS
Written by Dunja Bezdrov, Communications manager at ABC TECH Group
We are glad to announce that ABC TECH is showing its banking expertise at FinConf Conference 2019 in Sarajevo on April 25–26. It is 4th International Conference Dedicated to Innovation in Financial Services in Sarajevo with industry’s most progressive professionals across banking, telecom, FinTech and blockchain, and more.
We asked Emir Memic a few questions regarding LEONUS Banking digital and how it fits today thriving market.
1. What are the main challenges for Open banking?
We see that changes in regulation in the finance sector brought the opportunity for FinTech companies to become important contributors and players on the financial market. Open banking, as we see it today in Europe, is mainly built around PSD2 regulation and assumes access to account data at the transaction level based on user’s consent, using open API. This gives the opportunity to third-party providers to develop applications which rely on user’s account data and deliver advanced financial services. PSD2 defines two types of new financial institutions: AISP (Account Information Service Provider) which can only get account information and PISP (Payment Initiation Service Provider) which can initiate payment order on user’s behalf. As easy to understand examples of what each of these institutions can deliver, I could give PFM(Personal Account Management) for AISP and web shopping for PISP. In PFM aggregating data from several user’s accounts in different banks and tracking transaction can give the user a clear picture of his/her incomes and expenses, enabling responsible and efficient financial behavior and planning. When PISP is integrated with webshop user can get friction-less experience in shopping choosing any of available accounts or payment instruments to request PISP to execute payment.
As an idea, Open banking sounds great and we’re aware of some great AISP/PISP implementations, even before PDS2 became mandatory, like MobilPay (Denmark) and Swish (Sweden).
However, I see few challenges for open banking, some are technology related, some are related to user’s behavior and some are related to current state on financial markets.
From the technology point of view, there are two potential issues that first came to my mind: type of interface and performance. Since PSD2 doesn’t define technology of API, that exposes AISP and PISP to a potential risk of developing many different interfaces to inter-operate with different financial institutions who are just mandated to provide access, which can be a quite demanding and time-consuming task. Even the most well thought and advance service can be a total failure if data can’t be processed fast and results delivered almost instantly, so AISP, which has good performance response from one financial institution and poor from another one, can face customer rejection due to overall low performance. Then there’s a question of how many users have active accounts in several banks and which benefits they can see from such multi-access and aggregated view. And this brings us to a point where AISP and PISP will have to offer something more like advisory services, easier access to loans, investment advises and access to brokerage which goes beyond current PSD2 mandate.
2. What is the connection between LEONUS Banking digital solution and Cloud banking?
As a technology company, we’re focused on delivering solutions which will enable our customers to focus on their core business rather than to software development or running the infrastructure that this software relies on. I know that this is a common mantra of all technology providers but in our case, we really develop and deploy solutions to cloud environment enabling banks to fully outsource complete IT operations yet maintaining regulatory compliance. The implementation we’re currently working on is a fully digital branch-less bank, deployed to the cloud, offering both traditional banking services and access to advanced ones via integration with different service providers.
3. Marketplace banking — Is LEONUS Banking digital solution customers have been waiting for?
With 25 years of experience in developing and deploying different solutions in direct banking, I can say that I’ve seen almost everything that a software company can deliver to a banking environment. Our idea for LEONUS Banking digital is not to reinvent the wheel and to develop everything that we’ve ever seen but to deliver strong banking platform which is easy to integrate with third-party components and services. Our focus is on good user experience, well thought out design and easy to understand functionalities while technology and complexity have to stay well beyond integration layers. Since we’ll very soon have the first implementations of LEONUS in live production, we’ll have the opportunity to see the market’s reaction to our ideas and the product we deliver.
Catch us at FinConf Conference 2019 on April 25–26 at, by registering for a ticket here now » https://finconf.com/conference-pass/
About FinConf Conference
FinConf is the premier regional conference platform dedicated to innovation in financial services. FinConf aims at providing a forum for open and forward oriented discussion of European financial issues and financial markets. Leading topics, high-level speakers and top decision-makers share insights with technology partners and collaborate focusing on various and complex line-ups to rethink financial services. We structure our events by investigating into market challenges and top issues that industries endure to render the most effective learning and networking platforms by creating impactful and pragmatic B2B conferences. Being customer focused and having our client’s priorities in mind are among our core values and essential to the way we operate our business. We are devoted to deliver distinctive and comprehensive events and striving to maintain the highest qualities and standards.
About ABC TECH Group
ABC TECH Group is a provider of IT consulting services and software development with over 120 + IT professionals located internationally.
We are bringing platform-based solutions to large and midsized companies in Banking, Telecom as well as providing state-of-the-art solutions for start-up industry.
With the background rooted in Fintech, we build on our legacy knowledge and grow it in the areas of Transactional systems (Card transactions, Direct debit, PSD2, SEPA, GIRO) Financial systems and other 3rd party integrations, Blockchain and Smart contracting Payment systems (FIAT and Crypto), ICO startups SW development, Embedded systems, Loyalty Wallet development, E-commerce and Marketplace, Machine learning (AI) Social networks integration and many more. As part of this journey, we are working with Microsoft, IBM, Oracle, Node and more tech leaders to ensure that our clients will benefit from steady reliability and originality across solutions. We have diverse collective experience in a range of development languages and platforms. Our projects leverage the tool-kits and systems that best fit the distinct needs of our clients. We offer a full range of product, mobile and web development services for a wide variety of business domains and connect you to an effective, fully equipped team that is ready to commit from day one.
Follow ABC TECH Group:
Website: www.abc-techgroup.com
LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/company/abc-techgroup
Facebook: www.facebook.com/ABCtech2017
Twitter: https://twitter.com/ABCTECH_Group
