Legrand says when they find technology that looks interesting, they remain in touch with those companies and then decide whether to work with them. However, these relationships are made complex by the number of constraints BNPP has as a banking group.
“We don’t want to acquire too often because my team and the two teams that are used to working on technology or digital have acquired Agile, but the rest of the organization is sometimes a bit slower to keep the pace," said Legrand. "If you come up with some new FinTech or some new startup every two days, it will not work.”
According to Legrand, keeping Agile is also important because sometimes it’s very easy to grow quickly, but one can have a big meltdown a few years later because they forgot something important or the platform turned out to not be robust enough. The right way is to find the right balance between those two.
Editor's Note: Agile software development methodologies refer to a group of collaborative, responsive techniques for solving problems with technology.
“We are smart enough to build an open ecosystem so we can create some bricks on our own, or we can buy some others from FinTechs or partner with them," said Legrand. "Finding the right balance to work together is not easy because the list of processes and constraints can be overwhelming. If you grow too fast as a startup, it will not work either, because you have a duty to your clients.”
Startups need to make sure they understand how enterprises work, so they can adapt their communication and their methodologies to fit into the larger institutions' processes.
Enterprisees And Trends
Machine learning and behavioral analytics are wealth managemeant trends today for a reason. Legrand says it’s quite difficult to efficiently apply machine learning to retail and end clients, so they are focused on institutional clients and distributors. Still, once applied, machine may have great prospects for the industry, said Legrand.
“We have market data—we have so many things we can use to determine signals or some sentiment analysis on what people are thinking about the companies,” he said.
Big enterprise companies like BNPP need to develop a more customer-oriented approach. Legrand says the fragmented access to clients’ data on the European market currently prevents these companies from making services focused on the customer.