Innovate and aggregate value-added services

Our Securities Services business line is the "lifeblood" of banking, but it is little known: clearing, custody and custodian bank services, fund administration andasset servicing, cash management, transfer agent services, issuer services, etc. We work mainly in BtoB, for banks, insurance companies and large corporations: we make sure the markets run smoothly, in constant contact with the regulators. Of course, this is a highly regulated environment, where we are increasingly asked to produce reports, as we saw again last year with MiFID 2. And yet there is room for innovation.

• The first challenge is to offer the best service at the best cost by automating processes.

• The second challenge:  not to remain confined to our traditional activity, but to innovate and aggregate value-added services.

Partnerships

FinTechs do not compete directly with SGSS, but they do operate in certain segments of the value chain, such as blockchain. We screen between 2,000 and 3,000 FinTechs, analyse 20% of them and filter this result to select those we will meet.

Last year, for example, we made a commitment with the start-up Epsor to develop a 100% digital employee savings solution. Designed specifically for VSEs¹ and SMEs², this tool simplifies the employee savings plan, which is often unfamiliar to managers and misunderstood by employees, and currently concerns only 15% of French SMEs.

Another example, with Addventa: we have signed a partnership agreement to launch a service to automatically draft management comments. Our customers can therefore benefit from this instantaneous service that writes performance comments on their funds. The comments are produced over a given period of time, chosen by the customer, in several languages, in a clear and consistent style. Our aim is to be the first mover. We have created a network to encourage innovation, with contacts in each of our business lines, as well as an ecosystem of platforms in several countries: LePlateauLux in Luxembourg, Swave in La Défense, Catalyst in India... Our aim is to boost this network by facilitating a bottom-up approach.

We launched D-View, a decision support tool for asset managers. D-View gives asset managers access to dashboards that can be customised according to their needs and provides them with a consolidated view of their funds' distribution data from different domiciles.

The tool includes:

• Fund subscriptions and redemptions, which can be compared to assets under management;

• Breakdown of flows by country, investor type, fund type and ISIN³ code;

• The ranking of the top 10 distributors of each fund;

• Access to historical data over five years.

Measuring innovation

The best performance indicator remains customer satisfaction. Are we considered efficient and innovative by the end-customer? This measurement is qualitative, it is conducted both in customer relations and in calls for tenders (with our innovation rating). And that is also what we are looking for: we do not innovate for the sake of it, research is applied to the business lines. Another indicator relates to reducing operational risk, improving service quality and performance: fewer errors, faster handling of incidents when they occur, etc.

Digital best serves our interests by providing our customers with quality.

1 : VSE - Very Small Enterprise

2 : SME - Small and Medium-sized Enterprise

3 : ISIN – International Securities Identification Number

This article was published in November 2019 in the Innovation and Open Innovation Barometer published by the Electronic Business Group (EBG).