Claire Calmejane, chief innovation officer of Société Générale, tells Finextra Research that Banking-as-a-Service platforms are playing for both sides of the field with both greenfield and incumbent banks future-proofing their businesses against the evolving face of financial services.
Greenfield banks must ensure when looking to invest in architecture, they are going to keep up with the pace of change over the coming years and ensure they are building for the future, not just for the now.
Calmejane cites the growth of BaaS platform Treezor since it was acquired by Société Générale in 2018.
Treezor provides services across the payments chain via APIs to retailers, crowdfunding platforms and neobanks. The platform’s banking clients have gone from 10 to 70 in number in the two years since Société Générale’s acquisition.
“Today, there are around 60 different neobanks that have contracts with Treezor, as well as some large corporates that are starting to express some interest in consuming this type of architecture,” Calmejane says.
She explains how Treezor’s cloud-based microservice architecture allows clients to be flexible in how they build the customer journey and decide what customer needs they want to serve, allowing them to be very specific in what they want to offer in the market.
This also strengthens the the Treezor ecosystem and, by extension, the business model of Société Générale.
Calmejane lists some of the banking services that are using the Treezor platform, offering specific, boutique services. These include SME-focused business bank Prismea, mobile payments wallet for teenagers Banxup and a platform offering early-stage investing opportunities for mass-affluent clients.
Société Générale takes the roles of accelerator in the roll-out of these services, assuming responsibility for regulatory compliance in KYC, AML, anti-fraud and so on.
“This is also very powerful to Société Générale to be able to deploy part of our expertise in compliance and KYC to accelerate and strengthen their business model and services of Treezor for its clients, strengthening its core infrastructure and architecture,” Calmejane says.