Sweden’s Swedbank takes innovation to a different level by collaborating with other competing banks:
At Sweden’s leading banking institution, Swedbank, a vast majority of operations are fully digitized. This is mainly facilitated by a well-developed infrastructure constituting a number of data centers. The bank offers a varied range of banking and financial solutions, including financing, savings and investments, payments and cards, and trading and capital markets. It also provides services like safe deposit boxes, real estate management, brokerage and treasury and legal services. It is present in Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, China, Denmark, Finland, Norway, and the US and has over 7 million retail customers and 550,000 corporate customers in its home markets alone.
Swedbank works in a mainframe environment. It has recently engaged leading IT infrastructure services provider Kyndryl to manage and operate its mainframe systems. Kyndryl will concentrate on the bank’s core banking IT services.
As the bank has been making use of data in many ways, it felt the need for a secure, reliable system which necessitates increased number of data centers. The bank collaborated with Coromatic, the Nordic group that offers business continuity and critical facilities, to design and build a new data center in Stockholm. A most modern and functional data center thus came into being in the latter part of 2017.
UNIQUE EAP
The bank, as part of its digital transformation, wanted to enhance value for its customers and the first thing it did was to unify disparate data sources into a single data lake and migrating analytical capabilities to the cloud. It created an enterprise analytics platform (EAP), a scalable infrastructure to enable the use of advanced analytics. In this effort, it was assisted by Immuta, the US data security and software company, which provides a cloud-native data governance platforms, and Databricks, another US company that offers data, analytics and AI services through a cloud-based platform. What the bank originally had was an on-premise solution that replicated data across siloed platforms and had limited capabilities to separate storage from compute. With Immuta and Databricks, the bank could migrate to the cloud, leveraging Microsoft Azure. Specifically, Databricks provided deep learning and AI capabilities at scale.
PERSONALIZED SOLUTIONS
Swedbank has invested 3 million euro in Meniga, a Reykjavik, Iceland-based fintech company providing digital banking solutions, which resulted in the bank launching personalized digital banking solutions across markets in Sweden and the Baltic countries. The bank is now making use of Meniga’s solutions like the financial activity feed and real-time personal finance insights.
A COLLABORATIVE PRODUCT
Swedbank is also known for creating Swish, the highly popular mobile payment system in Sweden, which is the result of collaboration by 6 large Swedish banks and the Central Bank of Sweden. Swish is today used by more than 8 million people and is a member of the European Mobile Payment Systems Association. The service works through a smartphone application, where the users’ phone numbers are connected to their bank accounts, and which makes it possible to transfer money in real time. Though originally intended for transactions between individuals, it is now used for flea markets and collections at church services, and similar instances where a credit card reader is expensive or impractical. The service is free for private users.
What became the basis for Swish was a proof of concept done by Swedbank for P2P payments and an ongoing mobile payment project built on card infrastructure. The bank took the initiative along with other Swedish banks to create a working group under the umbrella of the Swedish Bankers’ Association. It acted as a lead bank, and set up a team with business and IT working together using agile methods.
Swish has been a big success, and subsequently Swish for companies (C2B), Swish Corporate (C2B), and Swish Retail (C2B adapted for e-commerce) came to be launched.
INSURANCE PRICING
The bank has recently collaborated with Akur8, a company that develops systems using ML and predictive analytics to bring in speed and accuracy in insurers’ pricing process, to have precision, efficiency and customer satisfaction in the bank’s insurance offerings. The cloud-based solution is tailored for insurance companies, providing advanced tools to automate and optimize pricing models with transparency and control. Swedbank’s insurance portfolio includes home, auto, travel, life and credit card liability insurance.
The platform’s ML technology facilitates quicker, more informed pricing decisions, leading to improved predictive performance and market responsiveness.
Swedbank works in several ways to make it easier for customers to meet the bank, both physically and digitally. Its digital services make it easy for customers to contact the bank and do their banking whenever and however they want. In addition to branches, a range of services are available on digital platforms such as the mobile app and the internet banking. The bank also has a unique channel. It has partnerships with retail stores and service providers to offer banking services in several places. It is also present in malls and other public places.
This article has been compiled based on publicly available information on the web, particularly the bank’s own website.
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