Big interview
metaphorical Mont Blanc to climb. Yet if anyone has their crampons on and their boots tied fast, it’s Bernard Gavgani. The group CIO at BNP Paribas since 2018, Gavgani has followed his industry’s march towards digitisation for decades. More to the point, he’s now pushing a number of exciting innovations from his Paris headquarters. From cloud support to digital assistants, each has the potential to revolutionise how his bank does business. For that to happen, however, Gavgani is finding that he, too, has to change. Like so many of his peers, that means escaping the CIO’s traditional wheelhouse – and taking a more central role in his bank’s future.
A night to remember
Though he joins our conversation a few minutes late, Bernard Gavgani is quick to reassure me that he’s happy to chat for as long as I need. “Now I’m with you,” he says, “we can continue until midnight!” He’s joking, of course – but given how much there is to get through, it’s not a totally outlandish offer. Over the past few years, indeed, BNP Paribas has revolutionised its technical offering. Just run through the list. In February 2017, it earmarked €3bn for digital transformation. In September 2019, it released a single dealer platform with an inbuilt digital trading assistant. In July 2020, it announced it was adopting IBM’s Cloud for Financial Services. That’s trailed by more recent innovations, including partnering with Orange Business Services to update the communications network at 1,800 bank branches across France. Yet listen to Gavgani talk and it’s clear that his
bank’s journey to the digital uplands began far earlier than 2017. “To understand these changes, we have to look at the story – which I can maybe start from at least 2000,” Gavgani explains. “The bank’s first transaction website began around that time to meet our audience with the growth of the internet.” From there, the CIO continues, BNP Paribas kept up with the innovations of the age, with call centres, ATMs and mobile phones all entering the bank’s arsenal. Even so, it initially proved tough to convince brick- and-mortar branches that they weren’t in complete competition with the new channels, while customers themselves struggled to understand what a new app or service could actually do for them. That ultimately led to a brand new campaign, launched in 2016, which aimed to bring customers aboard. “It was an attempt,” says Gavgani, “to overcome the limitations of the previous model by working with customers to focus on their experience, rather than highlighting the bank process.” The latest iteration of this principle, being rolled out over the next few years, has a similar aim: to fully develop banking-as-a-service (BaaS) across BNP Paribas. The French firm is far from alone here. Across the Pyrennees, for instance, Spain’s BBVA now offers
Future Banking /
www.nsbanking.com
Bernard Gavgani (pictured) is embracing change and digitalisation at BNP Paribas.
a number of digital services. That covers everything from moving money to creating new accounts. In London, meanwhile, Standard Chartered recently launched its own BaaS platform. Known as ‘nexus’ – the lack of capitalisation is trendily deliberate – it’ll allow digital platforms to offer customers loans, credit cards and saving accounts.
“Any bank that isn’t digitised nowadays isn’t lost because of competition, but because of the customer – they don’t want to continue to stay with them.”
With all this activity, you might imagine that BNP is cultivating its own digital garden to keep up with the competition. Gavgani disagrees. Instead, he says that customers themselves are eager for change. “Any bank that isn’t digitised nowadays isn’t lost because of competition, but because of the customer – they don’t want to continue to stay with them.” That claim is certainly supported by the numbers. Though coronavirus has whipped digitalisation from a trot to a gallop, the years before 2020 already saw an increase in support for new financial technology. One 2019 survey, for instance, found that a fifth of millennials with a loan used an online lender. That’s a 1.5 times increase on 2018.
The same survey also found that just 61% of people expect their bank to have a physical presence on the High Street, down from 65% the year before. This enthusiasm is especially sharp in developing countries. In Ukraine, for example, where BNP owns a subsidiary, Ukrsibbank, cashless payments have jumped by 23% in
72% 28%
The rise of fintech apps in Europe since lockdown.
The percentage of under 35s who believe the pandemic will change the way they do banking.
EY 9
BNP Paribas
Page 1 |
Page 2 |
Page 3 |
Page 4 |
Page 5 |
Page 6 |
Page 7 |
Page 8 |
Page 9 |
Page 10 |
Page 11 |
Page 12 |
Page 13 |
Page 14 |
Page 15 |
Page 16 |
Page 17 |
Page 18 |
Page 19 |
Page 20 |
Page 21 |
Page 22 |
Page 23 |
Page 24 |
Page 25 |
Page 26 |
Page 27 |
Page 28 |
Page 29 |
Page 30 |
Page 31 |
Page 32 |
Page 33 |
Page 34 |
Page 35 |
Page 36 |
Page 37 |
Page 38 |
Page 39 |
Page 40 |
Page 41 |
Page 42 |
Page 43 |
Page 44 |
Page 45 |
Page 46 |
Page 47 |
Page 48 |
Page 49 |
Page 50 |
Page 51 |
Page 52 |
Page 53 |
Page 54 |
Page 55 |
Page 56 |
Page 57
