innovation spotlight
Barclays has a stronger story than most
when it comes to innovation. First there was the Pingit mobile payments app and now Cloud It, a service for secure storage of documents, with the bank looking to also use this to provide statements. The corpo- rate banking side of Barclays is also now looking at Cloud It, says Fayyad. The bank also has its Barclays Accelerator initiative, in London and New York, with mentoring and access to the bank’s data and technolo- gy, co-working facilities and a demo day to pitch ideas at the end of the 13 week pro- grammes, backed up by seed funding from Techstars. BBVA is another bank that has been
seeking to nurture and capture external innovation longer than most (i.e. about three years). Here, as elsewhere, a key buzz- phrase is Open APIs, encapsulating the idea of opening up the bank to outside innovation to create an ecosystem. BBVA has an Open Innovation Framework which allows entrepreneurs, developers, students,
customers and employees to make use of Open APIs to build new products and ser- vices, or enhance existing ones, using BBVA assets (particularly the bank’s data).
InnovaChallenge in 2013 whereby it sought ideas and applications based on one year’s worth of anonymised data on credit card activity in Madrid and Barcelona. BBVA has subsequently done something similar in Mexico via its subsidiary, Bancomer, based on data related to cards processed at BBVA Bancomer point-of-sale (POS) terminals in Mexico City, Monterrey and Guadalajara from November 2013 to May 2014. In case anyone remains in denial about
the need to innovate, Fayyad cites the rap- id and spectacular arrival of Alipay, the payment portion of Alibaba, which now handles more payments by volume than all of the credit card companies combined. It includes cross-border online and mobile payments so that buyers can pay in Ren- minbi and then remit payments to interna-
tional merchants in one of the twelve for- eign currencies currently supported. Santander took the decision in 2014
that innovation would be a priority, says Mariano Belinky, who joined late in the year from McKinsey to become manag- ing director of its InnoVentures Fund. The bank expects to invest $100 million across twelve to 18 companies in the next year or so, he says. Ideas can be submitted via the InnoVentures website and there is a data- base of more than 500 applicants that are being whittled down at present. Santander’s areas of focus are set out
as payments, marketplace lending, e-investment advisory, client and risk ana- -
-
counting those ideas that are not within this remit. There are then three questions, says Belinky. Can we help this company? Can it provide a value proposition to our customers? And can we learn something from it?
© IBS Intelligence 2015
www.ibsintelligence.com
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