Even after years of cost cutting, banks could still be much more efficient if they would only share more utility back-office infrastructure. It’s a simple idea: hard to do in practice.
The chief executive of one leading European bank tells Euromoney: “I believe the way to launch them is in-country, beginning with one partner and then attracting others, rather than by trying to start a shared utility with four or five banks from the outset.”
In May, Finastra – the big provider of next-generation software to financial services firms spanning retail banking, transaction banking, lending, and treasury and capital markets – offered an example of how this might happen.
The company had announced in October that NatWest would be the first bank to integrate its blockchain-based Fusion LenderComm platform to handle all the communication between an agent bank on syndicated loans and the often-large number of lending banks.
LenderComm is a concept that emerged from a Finastra incubator scheme in 2016. It operates on the R3 Corda blockchain platform. In May, three more banks came on to it, all of them French: BNP Paribas, Natixis and Société Générale.
