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developer portals featuring country-specific APIs. RBI is now moving towards consolidating its offerings across CEE by gradually reuniting all its markets on a centralised platform: RBI’s API Marketplace (https://api.rbinternational.com).
Does this development already offer any significant advantages to the customer?
Arateanu: No, the end customer has yet to feel the full impact of this new network. For example, there are still very few cases of banks or TPPs offering personalised products based on account information. Payment providers still rely heavily on card processors instead of direct payments enabled by payment APIs. And even when it comes to consuming data from other institutions, neither traditional banks nor neobanks are yet fully aggregating account information from other market players.
In this respect, we are proud to say that we are now offering account aggregation services to our customers in Slovakia, which makes RBI one of the first financial institutions to offer innovative new services based on PSD2 data. The solution was jointly developed by teams from RBI and its subsidiary Tatra banka and is the first of its kind in our group.
In order to flourish as a traditional bank in the current environment a partnership-based ecosystem is an important success factor. How openly does RBI act here? Wolf: Nearly 200 years ago, the founding father of Raiffeisen, Friedrich Wilhelm Raiffeisen, emphasised the power of cooperation when he conceived the cooperative principles
on the basis of which participants supported each other in
the community. RBI’s charter reflects these principles, which facilitate the ideas of shared value creation and shared effort. Today we can say that RBI’s roots and history are amongst the main building blocks of its future.
We believe that partnerships are crucial if one is to become and remain a successful player on the market. This is why we launched our leading fintech program, the Elevator Lab, which enables us to cooperate with selected fintechs. It provides an opportunity for fintechs to scale their business ideas across RBI’s CEE markets, while RBI benefits from disruptive ideas and technologies that evolve, in a cooperative process, into
new innovative products and services. The program acts as
a channel for both maintaining existing and building new partnerships and is positioned as a key pillar of RBI’s strategy of creating the CEE region’s largest digital banking ecosystem. And how about partnerships and Open Banking? Wolf: RBI also attracts potential partners via APIs. When we publish an API, we allow other companies and developers to create products and services on top of our offering. If this effect is multiplied this will naturally create and nurture an ecosystem.
When attracting partners, we believe that there are two crucial aspects that either hinder or speed up the creation of ecosystems. These are the quality of the first interaction with this potential new partner and, subsequently, seamless onboarding and integration.
How do you ensure a perfect first contact
with potential partners?
Wolf: This first interaction – the bridge to our future potential partners – is ensured by RBI’s API Marketplace, which my colleague has already mentioned. This is an online portal
or “one-stop shop” that features all our publicly available APIs. Interested businesses can review our range of APIs and try these out in sandboxes that provide dummy data.
If they identify a potential use case for future cooperation, the Marketplace invites them to get in touch with us about producing their solutions.
With a view to smooth partner integration, we are actively working on a flexible IT infrastructure that will permit the easy, fast and structured onboarding – and also offboarding – of partners, with a high degree of scalability and low operating costs.
After all, our existing network of banks across CEE markets is already a form of ecosystem that promotes collaboration and is a great international starting point for engagement with external partners worldwide.
In summary, which three words best describe Open Banking?
Wolf: Partnerships, connectivity, ecosystem.
RBI’s first Open API Day focused on new insights into PSD2 and the Open API economy. Watch this video and learn more about the conference.
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RBI’s Open API Day 2019