Thought Leaders in Financial Technology: Hakan Nordfjell, Senior VP of eBanking and eCommerce at Gemalto (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: Let me ask you a few questions to understand how you’re going to market with this kind of technology. Is this like a central hub where banks are all signing up for access or is it an enterprise software solution that each bank is buying?

Hakan Nordfjell: The model is, you go bank by bank. You sell the solution to the bank and they consume your security. You will still sell your security solution to all of the parties, but you will have one single hub for it. If I login to Bank A, I can use exactly the same security solution to login to Bank B. I can use the same security solution to login to a government portal. There are certain initiatives around the world for trying to set that up. Gemalto is a valuable part of that. Obviously, we are trying to position ourselves as a player in that.

Sramana Mitra: What is the competitive landscape around that? Who else is in this business?

Hakan Nordfjell: When it comes to setting these initiatives, it’s usually the local banking community. It may be telco-driven. You always have the government taking a part of it. It’s more on a national level where you have several parties involved. It’s not that you see dominant players going around the world. It needs to be on a national level. It’s not something that is fast-moving.

You need to nurture it and you need to build it. We’ve seen initiatives with our partner in Belgium where they can use one type of authentication method and then do your banking service and government service through telcos. Those initiatives are going and that’s where Gemalto wants to play.

Sramana Mitra: Where in your universe are you seeing the emerging trend and the corresponding open problems where you could point entrepreneurs to start new companies?

Hakan Nordfjell: This is highly-discussed right now. If I am an end user and I want a third-party company to take care of my financial services and if I give them the authority to actually do banking on my behalf, they will either structure my account or actually do the payment on my behalf. That’s where you will see a boom of services. That will come during the coming years. It’s a very good area to enter.

What is still to be solved is how you do that security. Just imagine if you are a bank, you will see a third-party financial technology company asking to do banking services on behalf of a customer. The bank needs to know that I’m the one behind asking for that services. You need to have a looping system where the bank knows that I have authorized the third-party to do banking on my behalf. This is where if you have national schemes on security, it would mean that it is a trusted security system.

This segment is part 3 in the series : Thought Leaders in Financial Technology: Hakan Nordfjell, Senior VP of eBanking and eCommerce at Gemalto
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