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20 years with Eurogiro – an eye witness account
Eurogiro celebrates its 20th anniversary in February 2013 and Ms Sylvie Solignac, the current Chair-
man of the Eurogiro Board, has a 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
Eurogiro was created to fulfil the needs of a
dozen Western European Postal organisa-
tions. 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 paperbased
money orders, to its position today within a
global financial post and banking world with
electronic and global payment solutions.
Eurogiro is definitely 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 pay-
ments. 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 to end 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 agree-
ment between Eurogiro and Western Union.
Much has happened in the payments arena
since the creation of Eurogiro. What have been
the shaping influences on Eurogiro?
SEPA has totally changed the payments envi-
ronment within Europe and has made Eurogiro
focus even more on business expansion 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’ commit-
ment 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-implementations and allows users
to more quickly begin live production with its
counterparts.
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–efficient, 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 connec-
tivity 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 organi-
sations seeking inter-operability or outsourcing
all or part of their value chain within correspon-
dent banking. The future belongs to business
communities similar to Eurogiro cooperating
on standards and inter-operability and compe-
ting 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 stan-
dardise 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 a unique position to provide a link between
the banks and postal organisations.
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. Read full article on
.
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