What sets you apart from your peers this year and why?
This year has been a challenging one again, we have had to adapt to many changes and to evolving demands from our customers. The Swiss wealth management market is under pressure to be more profitable and we have witnessed a significant number of mergers and acquisitions. Remaining in touch with the realities of the market is one of the reasons for our success. Close cooperation with our clients and partners ensures that our solutions are in line with fast-evolving market needs and clients’ expectations.
How have your colleagues contributed towards the success of your organisation?
Thanks to a strong team spirit, ERI has built up solid expertise by envisioning future enhancements realistically while ensuring the efficiency of the existing product for our clients’ day-to-day use. This is especially true in the area of compliance, where more and more regulations are being introduced. All our achievements are driven by our total dedication to providing the highest level of service.
What are you going to do to stay on the front foot in a fast-growing but also challenging region such as this?
In our experience, listening and taking the needs of our clients on board is fundamental to staying in the game. It means you have to understand what will really bring added value to their day-to-day business and make sure your solutions evolve in that direction. As Switzerland is a very competitive market, those banks that have been able to offer extended personalised digital services during the pandemic have managed to attract net new money. What have been the challenges you have had to overcome to reach such a standard? Not being able to be physically close to our clients while managing implementation projects has completely changed the way we work. Although this was not totally new for us, since we have been delivering projects remotely for a number of years, we had to enhance our project methodology to ensure our quality levels were maintained. Our teams had to adapt quickly and make sure that they would keep the processes seamless. The agility and reactivity put in place have shown how flexible our structure can be.
Have your differentiators become more important to your business? Are they still relevant?
Well yes, more than ever our dedication to empower our clients with problem-solving tools is our main objective. We are therefore keen to support them in implementing streamlined and automated processes that will drive innovation, enabling them to focus on the key business objective: their clients’ satisfaction.
We have developed solutions that are able to adapt to very complex and specific requirements. As consolidating and understanding data is crucial for private banks and wealth managers, we make sure they receive the right data at the right time and that it is fully accurate to enable them to deliver the personalised services their customers are looking for.
In addition, as eliminating complexity and ensuring business continuity has become pivotal, leveraging a newly created SaaS model will help banks increase operational efficiency and workforce productivity.
Therefore, being able to interface and integrate FinTech solutions is seen as a key differentiator now that Open Banking has come into force and is mainstream. Thanks to its open connectivity with APIs and its service-oriented architecture, OLYMPIC Banking System allows banks and wealth managers to widen their service offerings and attract new customer segments and assets to develop new income streams. Providing options for alternative investments (REITs, SRIs, ESG investing, private equity, philanthropy, cryptocurrencies, etc.) is key to customer retention and acquisition in a market landscape where opportunities for diversified investment services evolve quickly.
This will not only ensure banks can adapt their business models to fast-evolving market needs and regulatory constraints, but will also facilitate a holistic approach to the customer lifecycle while optimising performance and minimising risks.
This then creates significant opportunities for technology to assist, which is of course supported by the amazing rate at which various FinTechs have emerged in the last few years. This in turn has meant that there is an even stronger need for suppliers like ourselves to work with the best FinTech organisations to deliver as holistic an experience as possible.
