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THE BIG INTERVIEW Being agile in my favourite region
In the aftermath of regulation encouraging competition and collaboration among fintech firms, what are the long-established core banking suppliers doing? John Smith, managing director for the EMEA region, Fiserv, tells us about innovation, regulation and his favourite part of the world when it comes to financial services
Junior Fintech Reporter Henry Vilar
Tell us about yourself and how you ended up where you are at Fiserv.
I’ve been at Fiserv for more than two years, having worked in the IT services business for well over 30 years – always in financial services, and looking to help clients innovate. I saw a great opportunity with Fiserv, to bring some of the strengths and capabilities that we have as a firm to the EMEA marketplace in financial services. So two years ago, I moved to lead the EMEA business in Fiserv.
What trends would you highlight at the moment in the financial technology industry?
First, from an industry perspective, we see multiple areas of change at the moment. But most notably, within that change, are PSD2 and Open Banking. A lot of new business models are being considered to meet the demands in that area. We also see the payments landscape changing, as a result of that legislation and other initiatives in the payments world. And all things digital, which continue to be relevant to our clients. Also, we see business models changing, where many of our clients are now looking to provide their consumer services in a more serviced way. For example, we’ve got pay-as-you-go, which I think mirrors what’s happening in terms of the demand from the consumer. I think these are the demands that we see in the marketplace at the moment.
What is Fiserv’s view and approach to these changes?
Regarding Fiserv’s response, we have a range of existing technology
solutions for our clients that help meet all of those needs. But we also recently made a couple of acquisitions which would allow us to do that more broadly. The first thing to say in regards to this is that we see our marketplace as both the traditional financial institutions, but also some of the newer challenger institutions that are growing in EMEA, and we see both of these sectors as our targets.
There are three things, specifically, that we are doing to address the demands that I mentioned in my previous answer. The first one is what we call Agility, which is a banking solution that allows our clients to consume banking services – and that’s a broad range of banking services, everything from core banking, digital front end, risk solutions, as well as partner solutions such as credit card – and we offer it to our clients as a service where they pay as they go. So that’s the first thing we’re doing as a business to respond to what we see as trends in the marketplace. That’s a solution that I think is of its time, and that we will see more of these types of solutions used in the future.
The second thing we’ve done during the last few months is acquired two businesses, which happen to be in the UK. The first one is Finkit Technologies, which allows us to position our clients more around servicing the API economy; that is growing because of PSD2 and Open Banking and allows our clients to take advantage of that new API economy. The second acquisition we’ve made is one called Dovetail, which is in the payments area. That’s really to allow our clients to have the payments infrastructure in place to meet their particular needs in EMEA, as well as elsewhere in the world, and connect to those payment systems more efficiently. Overall, what we see is Fiserv offering more and more of these services on a pay-as-
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