On 2 March 2023, the CIO Club event co-organised by Finologee and Techsense took place at Finologee’s premises to explore the subject of payment automation. Around 40 CIOs and IT/technology executives gathered to listen to the joint co-creation story of the BKO platform, developed by Finologee and Crédit Agricole Life Insurance Europe (CALIE), and to participate in the wine tasting that followed.

The panel discussion with Max Yakass, Chief Client Service Officer at CALIE, and Hocine Berrane, Chief Information Officer at CALIE, was moderated by Jonathan Prince, CSO & Co-Founder of Finologee. It covered the genesis of the joint project, the cooperation within CALIE and with Finologee, as well as some aspects of ESG, and concluded with an engaging O&A session with the audience.

Life Insurer CALIE & Finologee in co-creation mode Payment processes streamlined with compliant multi-bank platform BKO
The genesis of BKO: Finologee & CALIE

At the beginning of the conversation, Jonathan Prince recounts that the genesis of the BKO project stems from a discussion in 2019 about KYC needs, which soon revealed a bigger problem in CALlE’s payment system. As Max Yakass further explains, CALIE’s payment constellation was complex due to operations in multiple countries, multiple banks and some of them still relying on manual processing. Accordingly, the insurance company launched a tender to find a reliable and suitable treasury platform solution.

In the context of this call for tenders, Finologee stood out with its proposal to develop the BKO platform from scratch. It was fully tailored to CALlE’s initial needs and has been in operation for about two years now. It was supported by the Luxembourg government through its Research, Development and Innovation programm and officially launched in July 2021.

“We see this legislative transition as a robust roadmap to delivering on three strategic imperatives: strengthening consumer trust, perfecting the open banking framework and creating a more harmonised and competitive market.”

Raoul Mulheims, CEO and co-founder of Finologee 

Its purpose today is to empower regulated financial industry actors, businesses seeking to digitalise their payment flows, and institutional and intermediary players with optimised payment workflows that ensure higher levels of compliance. With BKO, payment initiation, validation, and reporting workflows are streamlined, giving businesses more control and oversight over their payments processes.

BKO as beautiful "human story" based on knowledge sharing

According to Hocine Berrane, BKO’ success story is mainly the result of collaborative working relationships and partnerships. Internally, the project was more than just an IT project, but also a business project involving different partments of the company. As Hocine further explains, the interest of co-creation was to create a knowledge diffusion where the ‘knowledgeable experts’ contributed their expertise and where all the participants acted players of change for the deployment in the company.

The result of this collaboration is a payments platform that is aligned with the needs o f customers and of institution lavers in general. 
By prioritising collaboration and knowledge sharing, this ensured the development of a product that is not only effective, but also user-friendly and ensures that organisations can streamline and monitor their workflows for payment initiation, validation and reporting.

The key to the success of this project really was communication between the different services and their involvement at every stage of the co-creation process.

Max Yakass, Chief Client Service Officer at CALIE

For Max Yakass, the co-creation project has succeeded on four fundamental pillars:

  1. Clearly defined governance both internally and with Finologee
  2. A comprehensive working methodology: all internal stakeholders participated in all relevant workshops, based on an agile approach
  3. Simple, fluid and direct communication
  4. A good dose o f pragmatism on both sides

The creation of BKO has been a beautiful human story and it continues…

Hocine Berrane, Chief Information Officer at CALIE

Of course, there were also some sticking points during the development of the product, but they were always easily overcome through communication, he says: The constant exchange of ideas and feedback allowed the project to run smoothly. The success of the BKO project can be attributed to the joint efforts of everyone involved and the transparent communication throughout the development process.” The co-creation continues today, ensuring that BKO remains a relevant and innovative payment platform for the financial industry and institutional players.

"Old ways won't open new doors": Envisaging additional dimensions

Hocine Berrane notes that CALIE faces other challenges in modernising its information system. The logic of developing and using APls is an important part of this evolution.

“Either way, we will also benefit from upcoming new BKO features that may be developed with and for other clients” says Berrane. Yakass adds that the next step for CALIE is also to integrate the digitisation of KYC processes into payments by using Finologee’s KYC Manager solution.

In addition, CALIE is committed to “digital sustainability” for all its future projects and the assessment of the ESG maturity of its suppliers, as well as the eco-design of projects and the training of employees, are important pillars of the approach.

Member attendance
Member attendance

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