20 years with Eurogiro - an eye witness account
Eurogiro celebrates its 20th anniversary in February 2013 and Ms Sylvie Solignac, the current Chairman of the Eurogiro Board, has a particularly good vantage point from which to view the creation of Eurogiro. Sylvie Solignac was in the community when Eurogiro was formed and returned a few years ago after taking a while away to take up other positions. Sylvie Solignac shares her views on Eurogiro
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| Sylvie Solignac, La Banque Postale France, Chairman of the Eurogiro Board |
Eurogiro was created to fulfil the needs of a dozen Western European Postal organisations. What were the essential needs at that time and what has changed since then ?
It all began under the leadership of the Nordic countries. The essential idea was to create a secured electronic payments network for postal organisations and to give a clear focus on the needs of corporate customers; this was basically Eurogiro's founding purpose. And this logically led to switching from operating within a purely postal world, exchanging paper-based money orders, to its position today within a global financial post and banking world with electronic and global payment solutions. Eurogiro is definetely now playing a key role as a provider for banks and postbanks, whereas it started as a provider for posts and postbanks.
What are the most important marks which Eurogiro has set on its market ?
Eurogiro has positioned itself, from the very beginning, as an expert in low value payments. The level of automation, through use of standards within a closed user group, has made it possible to manage these transactions at low cost as it led to high straight-through processing.
An important mark in the creation of the Euro was to centralise the settlement process on solution providers chosen amongst Eurogiro's customers. Two shareholders are today undertaking this role: Deutsche Bank and Deutsche Postbank. Eurogiro has also set its mark through the partnerships it has built with other large players in the market. These partnerships are not just all about delivering complementary services and customers; they have helped in achieving efficiency on specific operations and enabled a creative approach to the market through joint development of new ideas. This is clearly the case with the agreement between Eurogiro and Western Union.
Much has happened in the payments arena since the the creation of Eurogiro. What have, in your view, been the shaping influences on Eurogiro ?
SEPA has totally changed the payments environment within Europe and has made Eurogiro focus even more on business explansion in other regions of the world. A great deal of effort is now being made to increase intra-regional traffic outside Europe, mainly in Asia but also in South America and in Africa.
What are the core strengths of Eurogiro today ?
Eurogiro's model is based on its users' commitment and their participation in its evolutions and future developments. These have been crucial elements in accomplishing today's universal reach for international payments. Another strength is that of turnkey solutions which Eurogiro has made available to its users: this facilitates IT-implementation and allow users to more quickly begin live production with its counterparts.
Knowing what you know today, are there things you would have done differently in the Steering Committee in which you were active in the early nineties ?
I believe that from the start the Steering Committee has had a clear and strong strategic vision. We have been able to foresee most of the forthcoming evolutions in the payments industry, not even knowing then about the creation of the Euro and the changes it would provoke.
Eurogiro was created to improve business opportunities of the founding organisations by cooperation - how would you say Eurogiro has achieved its main goals ?
The key word is universality. Eurogiro has implemented a cost-efficent, automated fund transfer system to replace the exchange of paper-based money orders. It now provides all kinds of transfer solutions, whether to cash, to accounts or to mobiles, with access to close to half a million point of sales in the world. Eurogiro ensures interconnection between the most important postal organisations, banks and payment specialists on all five continents.
What are the main challenges of Eurogiro today and in the next 5-10 years ?
In order to achieve global reach and connectivity with payments providers all around the world, Eurogiro has to continue to build new partnerships. But as correspondent banking has become a competitive field with fewer players, we should see more and more organisations seeking inter-operability or outsourcing of all or part of their value chain within correspondent banking. The future belongs to business communities similar to Eurogiro cooperating on standards and inter-operability and competing on added value services.
Where are the best opportunities for Eurogiro in the next 5 years ?
As new technology is emerging for payments, such as mobile banking, Eurogiro has to capitalise on its quality standards. Pursuing excellence has always been the driving force for Eurogiro. SEPA also has to be seen as an opportunity as it has forced the market to standardise and reduce costs. With similar regional and global communities likely to emerge, Eurogiro, with its experience, is the best placed organisation globally to help financial institutions meet future challenges. Eurogiro is in an unique position to provide a link between the banks and postal organisations.
Your organisation, La Banque Postale, was among the founders (though as the financial services leg of La Poste) - what role has Eurogiro played in your organisation ?
I was in Tokyo with the Chairman of the Executive Board of La Banque Postale for the 2012 IMF meeting, I realised then how useful our Eurogiro contacts had been in helping to initiate high level contacts with other organisations. Through the years, we have built, together with our Eurogiro partners, long term cooperation and valuable, close business relations. Eurogiro is, in some respects, also a business club.