Chennai-based Intellect Design Arena helping Nordic’s Resurs Bank migrate to cloud-based platform

Resurs Bank, a leader in retail finance in the Nordic region, is the first bank in the region to embark on digital transformation by moving to a Cloud-based platform. And, helping it in this transformation is the Chennai-based fintech company Intellect Design Area.

The bank’s CEO Nils Carlsson said the transformation started two years ago with a survey of nearly 4,000 customers across four countries—Sweden, Denmark, Norway and Finland—asking them on how their relationships with the bank should be?

“They expected the bank to be a friendly, warm and not ice-cold bank that you don’t want to have a relationship with your customers. And that was a little bit what Resurs may have been for the past 20 years,” he said.

The bank has six million customers in the region and works with nearly 1,500 partners. It’s operating income for the year ended December 31, 2022 increased by 4 per cent to Swedish Krona 3,204 million. The transformation was required taking in to consideration the high mobile penetration in the region. The millennials and next gen don’t want to come to the bank, and want the solution in real time, and quick solution, he told businessline on his visit to Chennai recently.

Also read: BCD Group bags contract for turnkey works in multi-million dollar residential project in Chennai

Intellect for Resurs is implementing a Cloud-ready digital banking solution called Intellect Digital Core (a comprehensive banking suite for retail banking) and iKredit360 (a technology platform that enables institutions to curate unique credit experiences to merchants, channels-partners, and end consumers).

The technology platform is designed for European financial institutions. The platform will help the bank in moving its technology to the cloud rather than having it in its premises.

Online retail sales experienced a surge in 2020 due to the Covid-19 pandemic, and despite the reopening of physical retail stores, the online e-commerce industry is expected to grow further.

Resurs Bank, which has pioneered the Buy Now Pay Later model, wanted to improve customer satisfaction by exploring new banking platforms, he said.

On reasons for selecting Intellect, Carlsson said, “We did a survey looking at 20 vendors globally. Intellect ticked every box we had. It’s not only on the technology side because we need to have a partner whom we can learn from, ” he said.

On how much the bank is spending on the transformation, Carlsson said, “Probably, we are talking about Euro 50 million.” On the transaction with the Intellect, he said, “I can’t say exactly, but a fairly big portion. It is not 50 per cent and it is not 10 per cent. Something in the middle.”

“I always say to the Intellect guys, you need to dare to challenge us and not just say okay or we will deliver,” he said.

COMMENT NOW