Speaker Interview- Olivier Crespin

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Since becoming the Chief Executive Officer of the new entity in May 2018, Olivier Crespin has focused on leveraging hybrid digital banking strategies to establish Zand as the first fully digital bank in the region to combine both retail and corporate banking.

He is committed to establishing state-of-the-art infrastructure and processes coupled with analytics frameworks and big data environments to deliver unique customer journeys and to provide innovative, effective financial solutions that help simplify business and lives, addressing the needs of both retail and corporate customers. Crespin brings over 20 years of extensive expertise and leadership roles in digital banking and FinTech across Latin America, the USA and Asia. He recognises the need for a customer-centric approach to humanise the banking industry.

Please have a look at his 3view on our upcoming Leading Summit on Financial Services Innovation and Excellence held from 7th – 8th September 2021.



Q- Is there a vital correlation between innovation and entrepreneurship in driving technological advancement in the way the overall banking system works?

Yes. It is much easier for banks to take technology to incrementally advance forwards, as they evolve the systems and processes, they know and understand. External innovation, disruption, and the entrepreneurship that comes with that can drive step-change, though.



Q-Based on your level of industry expertise, how can you describe the current systematic evolution

Almost all banks have recognized the need to modernize – in their skills, their systems, and their processes. The approaches to that differ greatly though, both in what each bank is trying to evolve into, and their route to getting there. There is broad acceptance of the migration of customers to more digital channels, and the need to build capabilities to maintain those relationships even if the face-to-face interaction is lost in that migration.



Q-As we adapt to the current digital disruption, would you consider the need to build and enforce a Cashless Economy where digital lending and online payments would be incorporated as paramount?

Holistic digital financial services can enable and power much broader services and industries. However, rather than enforcing it on customers, the goal should be to make them compelling enough that customers want to adopt them. If they don’t, to understand the challenges faced by customers and the solutions cash was providing.



Q-Can you share 3 essential tips with new entrants within the retail, wholesale and institutional sector in relation to developing and promoting cross border payments?

  1. Solve a real customer problem
  2. Understand all the different people involved in the chain
  3. Make it easy, relevant, best rate, instant



Q-Within the GCC region, how are Banking and Financial Institutions adapting to digital disruption despite some hinderance on governmental policies? Do you foresee a potential for more policy changes and flexibility in the future regardless of security challenges?

Government policies are actually really helping with the digital disruption; providing frameworks and consistency to operate within. Ensuring cross-border alignment would further promote broader, integrated financial services, of course.



Q-.As cross-border payment models have the tendency to be inefficient because there is not one single universal global payment system. Can you highlight 3 challenges that must be overcome in order to improve the cross-border payment processes?

End-to-end transactional certainty has always been a challenge; being sure that a transaction is going to complete at the recipient’s end before it is ‘committed to’ from the sender. This is an incredibly difficult challenge given all the steps involved, such as screening the transaction by multiple parties, etc.



Q-. Can you talk about some of the current trends shaping the future of the cross-border payment landscape within the GCC region?

There’s the new GCC payment initiatives which is very encouraging. Blockchain based solutions are obviously a big one



Q-. We are aware that some domestic infrastructures are not designed to handle cross-border payments, what advice do you give to your other industry peers in other to bridge the infrastructure gap?

There are always going to be ‘infrastructure gaps’ outside the bank; these may be gaps in speed, efficiency, resilience, functionality, or just misalignment between multiple partners. And this landscape constantly changes. Industry players need to build modern, flexible architectures to help efficiently manage this everchanging ecosystem, minimizing the overheads.