Italian banking body, CBI, takes to the FinTECHTalents stage to outline CBI Globe – it’s newly launched Global Open Banking Ecosystem.

CBI has been serving the Italian payments market for 20 years – what brings you to FinTECHTalents?

The Italian banks, like most continental retail banks, are facing different challenges related to improved profitability, fulfilling regulatory requirements, facing competition from new and innovative market players and adapting to a more sophisticated customer demand for security, transparency and operability. All this should be tackled by effectively embracing technology or, in other words, by stepping on a digital transformation path.

For over 20 years, CBI has supported Italy’s financial industry in keeping up with the challenges of the digital economy, providing guidance, tailored services and innovative solutions. Thanks to its know-how and longstanding experience in addressing technological and regulatory change, CBI helps banks to transform themselves, improve their competitiveness and profitability, and reinvent their role in a fast-evolving financial ecosystem.

Along with its clients, CBI also contributes to reshape the relationships between financial institutions, their customers and the Public Administration.

Within the new competitive scenario depicted by innovation, the needs of new customers and regulation, CBI has evolved its role toward innovative services which can enhance banking and financial player competitiveness. Today, traditional banks and FinTechs should not be perceived as different players and competitors within the same market. Different studies show us that collaboration and coopetition are best ways to reach success from both perspectives. Coopetition and collaboration represent keywords within communities and innovative ecosystems. Thanks to its international experience and its wide constituency, CBI cannot miss events where FinTechs, IT Providers, Banks, and other financial institutions are together to shape future markets.

Building platforms and ecosystems is heavily debated in FinTech circles – despite these types of projects popping up throughout the industry – is the industry just getting on with it, while the industry chats?

CBI Globe is a Global Open Banking Ecosystem which represents that the industry is not only chatting about innovation but rather investing in new technologies and shaping new business models more addressed to customers’ expectations

It is aimed at easing its members’ ability to meet the obligations of Payment Services Directive II and the requirements requested by Open Banking markets, for the digital exchange of information and payments with third parties, while ensuring a higher level of consumer protection.

CBI Globe offers a TPP Enabler service to help Payment Institutions to:

• Reduce time-to-market requested by Open Banking implementations (e.g. payment initiation services, account information and harmonization services, smart onboarding…)
• Reach cost-sharing opportunities exploiting a solution adopted by multiple payment institutions
• Connect with a single interface (one to many) instead of set-up multiple channels (many to many) with all the banks involved in payments operations
• Outsource operational tasks and API versioning to CBI Team instead of monitoring, on a daily basis, the banks API Portals and websites
• Participate to a new Open Banking and Data Sharing ecosystem to join new business opportunities and to reach relevant synergies
• Share common procedures and operational framework with all the players involved in CBI community
• Reduce market fragmentation with regards to technical specifications, common frameworks and operational guidelines
• CBI Globe can so be considered an ecosystem for open banking innovation, it’s an international collaborative solution that facilitates the interconnection between ASPSPs and TPPs (Third Party Providers).

As of today, CBI Globe has already been chosen by more than 300 banks. From January 2019 and in particular with the opening of the «Sandbox» on March 14, 2019, over 50 PSPs in the role of AISP / PISP / CISP have requested information on the specific CBI Globe API.

CBI Globe can thus be considered an ecosystem for open banking innovation, supporting member banks in the development of collaborative and competitive value-added services at lower costs and a faster time-to- market process.

The final consumer will be able to take advantage of new services, developed by the ASPSPs and by third parties, and conveyed through a high standard solution of cybersecurity.

The presence of a single access point, rather than multiple connections, will also ensure the broader reachability of the user’s payment accounts and a further streamlining of the accessibility of the accounts. Furthermore, banks will be able to provide new value-added online services in savings, credit, treasury management and other fields. CBI Globe is a Regtech platform that is build applying DevOps and Agile principles, in order to develop and integrate microservices offered to clients by the whole financial ecosystem, including banks, FinTech and InsurTech.

Furthermore, we note that many banks are directly investing in collaborations with FinTech, Universities, IT providers in order to squeeze their traditional assets, like for instance their customer base, clients’ trust, spending power, to design e develop new services intended for Retail and Corporate targets.

Is ‘platformification’ the future for financial services?

The new scenario that is emerging opens the way to new ecosystems where we are witnessing a strong transition from purely competitive logic to collaborative logics that see traditional banking operators, FinTechs and players of other industrial sectors as protagonists.

CBI Globe is therefore a candidate, also at international levels, as a concrete project of collaboration between banks for the adaptation to the new European regulation on payments and as a driving force for the development of advanced services in the data sharing economy over the PSD2 requirements.

Community is the future for financial services despite the platformification or other uses of technologies. The international experience in banking and finance show us that successful projects and services are adopted by a large number of players, characterized by common technical specifications and clear rules. A common platform – with some characteristics – can simplify aggregation of players (Fintech, traditional banks, IT Providers…), sharing common rules and technical elements but it represents an empty space without a community.

These are the reasons which drive us to invest in CBI Globe, a platform that today has been adopted by 300 banks intending to develop new services enhancing the “Open Data” community.

CBI Globe will be presenting on the FinTech Stories Stage at FinTECHTalents this November.