The Open Day dedicated to open banking organized by the international competitiveness cluster, Finance Innovation, was held on April 20. It included several roundtables bringing together more than fifty experts from the financial ecosystem.
One of these roundtables notably dealt with the challenges and perspectives of new business models in Open Finance.
This provided Laure Boutron, Chief Marketing Officer of Treezor, with an opportunity to compare her arguments with those of her opponents from various backgrounds: Crédit Mutuel Arkea, Powens, Particeep and Meelo.
Here is a summary of this discussion.
What does the value of the end customer represent for Treezor and where does it reside?
Laure Boutron: The value of the end customer is a key point for Treezor. Indeed, we have a privileged relationship with our customers, we are their strategic partner. As an Electronic Money Institution (EMI), we are the guarantors vis-a-vis the regulator of our “agent” customers’ flows, and therefore those of their own customers. These financial flows are generated by the end customers, who may be companies or individuals. Thus, the increase in the flows generated by our agents’ end customers generates an increase in Treezor’s activity. It is therefore in the interest of all players, including Treezor, to ensure a seamless customer experience.
What are the profiles of Treezor’s agents?
Laure Boutron: Since the outset, Treezor has been helping its agents to integrate complex payment methods into their value chain. We like to repeat our motto: “Treezor’s success is based on the success of our customers.” Our clients include fintechs and established companies from various sectors: players in the mobility sector, employee benefits, institutions in the field of social welfare, neobanks, all of which fully trust our expertise.
What is the relationship between Societe Generale and Treezor?
Laure Boutron: The Societe Generale group acquired Treezor in 2019, and today we work in total synergy with the Group. In the context of Open Finance, being part of Societe Generale has notably allowed us to integrate an API credit service via Franfinance, a subsidiary of the Societe Generale group. We have thus made an off-the-shelf credit offer with this consumer credit specialist available to our existing customers.
How is value sharing part of Treezor’s business model?
Laure Boutron: Any company that wants to integrate payment services (flow or card program) has only one contact, which is Treezor, which works with many players and partners. This illustrates the key role of value sharing in Treezor’s business model. Open Finance only amplifies this phenomenon, when the number of partners with which Treezor is linked increases.
Treezor is the single point of entry for services to embed finance into the customer experience. Embedded finance represents a market that could reach $230 billion in revenue by 2025, up from $22.5 billion in 2020. We wanted to address this issue through a white paper that details the scope of the benefits of this market trend as well as the associated challenges.
What are the prospects for Open Finance in the years to come?
Laure Boutron: The development of financial services will continue. Currently, the state of payment services is not homogeneous in all European countries. Some countries are further ahead than others. This discrepancy supports the goal of further harmonizing payment services in Europe in the coming years. There is still a long way to go to achieve this, but Open Finance can accelerate this harmonization trend. And initiatives such as SPAA (SEPA Payment Account Access Scheme), for which the membership process will be open from September 1, 2023, will contribute to achieving this goal.
