For this issue of WealthTech Talks, we caught up with Jean-Philippe Bersier, Director of Sales & Marketing at ERI. ERI has built up solid expertise by envisioning future enhancements realistically while ensuring the efficiency of the existing product for clients’ day-to-day use.
In this interview, Jean-Philippe Bersier shared his insight into market challenges, and how OLYMPIC Banking System targets and addresses these challenges. He also shared the business's current focus of providing comprehensive and quality software solutions.
Could you introduce your business by sharing who you are and what you do?
ERI is a global solution provider of a leading-edge, fully integrated, digital, front-to-back, parameter-driven banking solution: OLYMPIC Banking System.
Close to its clients, ERI is present in major financial centres with offices in Geneva, Lugano, Zurich, London, Luxembourg, Paris, Madrid and Singapore.
For more than 30 years, we have been supporting the growth of our clients, via our solutions and with our highly qualified consulting teams, and enabling them to create a competitive advantage while monitoring, controlling, and lowering their operating costs and optimising the performance of their businesses. OLYMPIC Banking System supports a broad range of functional domains and business segments through its flexible conceptual design. In addition, the agility of the solution allows our clients to adapt their strategies and business models to meet the new technological and regulatory requirements of a fast-changing environment.
We are focused on providing comprehensive, quality software solutions, successful system implementations, and on-going application maintenance as well as dedicated support services.
With significant continuous investment to leverage advancements in technology, OLYMPIC Banking System is viewed as being a state-of-the-art solution, and ERI as a leading provider to the private banking and wealth management industry.
How has the firm evolved over its history, and what major milestones have been achieved?
The very first release for the OLYMPIC Banking System was launched in the 1990s. It was successful from the outset. Within 18 months of its launch, it had already acquired 15 new customers. The popularity of the system, among financial institutions and mainly private banks, was due to its highly customisable interface (it is entirely parameter-driven and therefore adaptable to each different banking environment), and to its client-centric design, as opposed to accounting-oriented. The international growth of ERI started then and we are now established in the major financial centres with a large customer base across various banking and financial sectors.
All through its history, ERI has been actively engaging with its clients and considering their feedback. Thanks to a continuous evaluation of market trends and client demands, we are constantly enhancing our solutions. Indeed, ERI delivers regular updates to its flagship product every 12 to 18 months, ensuring ongoing support for new financial instruments, regulatory developments, expanded functionalities, and the integration of emerging technologies. In addition, our open architecture and API-driven integration allow us to stay connected to a dynamic ecosystem of partners. As a result, our clients benefit not only from frictionless access to best-in-class ancillary services, but also from a core banking platform designed for continuous innovation.
Where does the firm stand now in terms of size, client base, geographic focus, and solution offerings? What main market issues are shaping the business?
ERI has over time remained among the global leading core banking providers, counting over 400 successful implementations of OLYMPIC Banking System in 60 countries. Our commitment to research and development, with 20 percent of its annual turnover and 40 percent of its staff dedicated to R&D, underscores our emphasis on client satisfaction and product enhancement.
In terms of geography, ERI currently serves territories across Europe, Africa, Middle East, the Americas and Asia.
Our solution, OLYMPIC Banking System, is a fully integrated, front-to-back, parameter-driven digital platform supporting banks and financial institutions with streamlining their core business activities across their clients’ entire lifecycle. Built around a unified, client-centric architecture, it enables firms to manage all financial products and services through a single, integrated system. Institutions benefit from real-time updates to positions and balances, ensuring accurate, up-to-date data across all business lines. The platform’s flexible, parameter-driven design allows users to customise workflows, products, and accounting logic without coding, making it highly scalable and adaptable to constantly-evolving regulatory constraints and the market environment. Delivered with a pre-configured best-practice model, OLYMPIC Banking System accelerates implementation while reducing costs. It can be deployed on-premises or in the Cloud. OLYMPIC Banking System is available among others on IBM Cloud, Azure and AWS. More recently, our new Digital Banking Platform has been enhanced with state-of-the-art UI perspective and is natively integrated with the core system.
Rather than market issues, we prefer considering market challenges. Several ones will be shaping the business in the coming years, among them:
- Technological advancements: a vast amount of data is available to understand the financial goals of clients to propose tailored solutions and in this context, the importance of data visualisation, consolidation and integration is becoming critical. There is no doubt that the use of AI will bring new opportunities. Integrating AI and machine learning in portfolio analysis, for example, could improve the user experience. The use of Generative AI could also simulate market scenarios and identify potential risks and gains.
- Shifting client expectations: we are observing a growing client appetite for greater involvement in investment decision-making. Adapting strategies to reflect the values and preferences of younger generations will be critical to effectively navigate the great wealth transfer. High-net-worth and institutional clients now expect seamless digital experiences, real-time portfolio performance tracking, and hyper-personalised investment insights. To meet these demands, we have significantly enhanced our capabilities, enabling customised investment proposals and advanced performance analysis.
- Evolving regulatory landscapes: a priority is to have an agile and flexible system capable to adapt to local and international regulatory requirements while remaining competitive and effectively mitigating reputational and operational risks.
How did the firm's focus on the wealth management sector develop, and how have you evolved in serving this financial service area?
We believe a flexible core banking platform that is capable of scaling to meet the needs of institutions of all sizes and integrating seamlessly with third-party systems is essential for banks aiming to compete with new entrants offering digital only private banking facilities. Such flexibility enables the rapid launch of new products and services, accelerates time to market, and supports the delivery of advanced digital capabilities to end users. Today’s customers demand seamless and consistent experiences across both digital and physical channels. As such, modern core platforms like OLYMPIC Banking System must support real-time, API-enabled services across mobile, web, and branch environments.
Features like instant payments, straight-through processing, and real-time risk monitoring are no longer differentiators, they are becoming baseline requirements. Ultimately, our core banking system empowers wealth managers to offer tailored, compliant, and innovative services that meet the specific needs of their clients.
Specifically, regarding the wealth management sector, what is your business's current focus? What market insights are you hearing, and how are you addressing the needs and relevant topics for wealth managers?
Looking ahead to the coming months, ERI anticipates further enhancements driven by evolving regulations and further exploration of AI's potential applications in banking, including portfolio modeling and risk analysis. Indeed, new and disruptive technologies will reshape the wealth management sector positioning the industry for an exciting and transformative future.
A key priority for some financial institutions will be to move away from legacy systems that hinder innovation, enabling them to adopt a future-ready infrastructure and streamlined workflows with a modern architecture to automate and streamline their daily operations to lower their total cost of ownership.
ERI's future endeavours also include continual improvement across digital banking, portfolio management, private equity, and fund administration as they remain focal points for the wealth management sector.
About ERI
ERI is the provider of OLYMPIC Banking System, a fully integrated, real time, front-to-back, parameter-driven technology platform. Over 400 banks and financial institutions across 60 countries have chosen OLYMPIC Banking System to streamline, automate, and digitise their daily processes.
Our solutions assist various banking and financial segments in achieving cost and operational efficiency. The platform provides a complete set of decision-making, transaction processing, and control tools to support domestic and international core services. It comprises a functionally rich client centric core system and a wide range of integrated front, middle, and back-office functions: CRM, client onboarding, regulatory reporting, portfolio and order management, advisory, and digital banking.
For more information, click here to view ERI's profile.
About the WealthTech Talks Interview Series
In the WealthTech Talks interview series, we interview senior executives from leading wealth management firms, solution providers, and WealthTech influencers to learn more about them, their journey, their perspectives on the market and how they see the future of wealth management.
Read the latest editions in the series below!
