Everything about networks and networkmodels, Aswell as companies who use these networks.

Open Banking and the (Eternal?) Crucial Question: Market-Driven or Regulated?

For a good four years now, open banking has been a topic considered relevant by the Swiss financial industry. This was triggered in particular by the EU regulation PSD2, which became valid for all member states in 2018 and was subsequently implemented. Various players have been working on this topic since then, but implementation is progressing slowly.For this reason, the State Secretariat for International Financial Matters (SIF) feels compelled to make a clear announcement. Regulation seems to be getting closer.

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Platform Confusion: A Spotlight on the Concept of Platforms and Their Classification in the Context of Business Ecosystems

A platform, sure, that’s something you can build other things on. I’m sure we all remember the “Lego plates”, which provided the basis for giving free rein to one’s imagination and indulging in architectural test projects. In economics and science, it is unfortunately not as easy to define the platform concept as in the example described above. With this article, we will now try to shed some light on platform definitions. In addition, we will shed light on the core value driver – network effects – and establish the concept’s connection to business ecosystems.

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Cross-Company Data Exchange in a Cross-Industry Trust Network – Added Value for Customers, Companies and Partners! 

More extensive business cases such as opening a bank account or an account with a FinTech require several minutes of time each for a low-value-added customer experience – wouldn’t it be great if you could skip all the tedious steps relating to data collection during onboarding and start right away with the advisory service or the effective satisfaction of your core needs? These and other questions have been considered for a little more than half a year as part of a workshop series of the OpenBankingProject.ch (OBP) and discussed together with more than 30 companies from the Swiss financial industry. This article is intended to provide an overview of the background, initial delivery results as well as the current state of knowledge of the efforts within the OpenBankingProject.ch workshop series.

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COP26 and the Circular Economy

The Glasgow Conference and its decisions have prompted us to consider the sustainable development of our planet and the extent to which the Circular Economy can contribute to achieving climate goals. In this article, we first look at the climate challenges and the developments of the Glasgow Conference and then take a look at how companies can contribute to a more sustainable development of the economy by transforming their production according to the principles of the circular economy.

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Core Banking Radar – «From Modularbank to Tuum – a core banking system that’s not only for banks»

Since 2017, the Core Banking Radar has regularly analyzed the most common as well as emerging core banking systems in Switzerland using a comprehensive assessment model[1]. The latest publication highlights the Estonian neo-system Tuum and shows success factors for its use. The Core Banking Radar is a joint project of Swisscom and the Business Engineering Institute St. Gallen.

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Gaia-X – A Revolution for the Financial Industry?

Cloud solutions are faster, more flexible and less expensive than on-premise solutions. However, the best-known cloud infrastructures – Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google Cloud, Microsoft Azure and IBM’s Red Hat – all have one thing in common: they are headquartered in the USA and are therefore subject to the (decidedly lax) US data protection “law”. This makes using the services difficult from a data protection perspective, especially for financial institutions. The European Gaia-X project could be a real alternative.

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Towards a Framework for Understanding the Potentials of Tokenized Assets

When attempting to assess the potential of tokens for their business, decision makers face the challenge that while there are tons of technical literature on token design, there are no simple decision support tools to help identify suitable use cases for their own business.
Therefore, we conducted a study to derive archetypes that can be observed in a variety of existing token-based solutions. These archetypes provide companies with an initial starting point for addressing the benefits and potential applications of token-based solutions.

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Successful Cooperation: What Banks and Fintechs Need to Consider

For a long time, fintechs were seen as a direct threat and competitor to traditional banks due to their high innovative capacity and the disruption potential attributed to them. In recent years, however, it has become apparent that both fintechs and banks are more interested in cooperation than in competition. However, there are factors that can cause a cooperation between a bank and a fintech to fail. How to prevent this is the topic of this article.

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Embedded Finance

61 % of Germans would obtain financial services from an online retailer. In contrast, 65% of German banks do not see their customer interface threatened. The situation is similar when it comes to the question of whether banks see themselves threatened by disruption from digital competitors, with 68% answering in the negative. In view of these contradictory figures, the question arises as to whether German banks are in the process of missing out on one of the most disruptive trends in banking: Embedded Finance.

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Success Factors for Business Ecosystems – An Analysis for the Banking Market Germany from the Orchestrator’s Perspective

The concept of business ecosystems has become established in the context of corporate operations in recent years. Business ecosystems seem to provide a particularly advantageous foundation in times of uncertainty and diverse customer needs. Often, companies that orchestrate value creation among the different actors are considered to play a prominent role when it comes to enabling business ecosystems. The question, however, is what factors are necessary for an orchestrator to be able to build a business ecosystem business model. In the following, I provide insight into the results my master’s thesis, which identifies such factors from an orchestrator’s perspective.

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Strategic Positioning in the Insurtech Jungle
– Results of an Insurtech Analysis

Insurtechs are constantly making news in the financial world. Whether they are seen as the big competitor to insurers, exploiting the limping digitalization of the big players, or helping conventional insurers to arrive in the 21st century, startups are bringing a breath of fresh air to the industry through new technologies such as artificial intelligence (AI) or natural language processing (NLP). Due to the abundance of new services and business models, it is appealing from both an entrepreneurial and scientific perspective to gain an overview of the structure and innovative capacity of the market.

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Classification of Blockchain-Based Applications: A Conceptualization from a User Perspective

Despite many known advantages, it is still difficult, especially for practitioners, to identify concrete application areas for blockchain-based applications. This article takes this as its starting point and presents a sector-independent typology of application fields, which not only serves to analyze existing blockchain applications, but also provides users with an orientation as to which general possible uses there are for the blockchain and how complex an initial implementation of the respective applications can turn out to be.

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An Analytics Marketplace for SMEs

For small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), AI offers enormous potential for scaling and increasing efficiency, but for these companies in particular there is no alternative to using GAFA services because they themselves lack, for example, machine learning knowledge or the necessary data to train algorithms. An analytics marketplace could solve these challenges.

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Ant Group – The Brightest Star in the Ecosystem Sky?

37 billion US dollars. With this issue volume, Ant Group, formerly Ant Financial, a Chinese tech group created by Alibaba founder Jack Ma, was to be traded on the Shanghai and Hong Kong stock exchanges. Many see new value creation logics, so-called business ecosystems, which Ant Group is said to have developed for itself, as being behind the rapid growth and the extremely high company valuation. However, the assumption that Ant Group is an ecosystem should be treated with caution. In the following, we have analyzed individual platforms in more detail based on the work of the CC Ecosystem.

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Business Ecosystem, Innovation Ecosystem, Platform Ecosystem – How Many Ecosystem Terms Do We Really Need?

The trend towards value creation in ecosystems has led to a multitude of ecosystem definitions in the past. This makes it difficult even for the interested reader to understand the research results presented. To what extent do the ecosystem concepts really differ and can the findings of one field be transferred to the other?

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Open Banking White Paper – The Future of Collaboration in Corporate Banking

According to a survey, 90% of bankers are convinced that open banking can increase the organic growth of banks by 10%[1]. A global banking survey also found that 86% of banks plan to use open APIs in the next 12 months to enable open banking capabilities[2]. To address this development and better understand the opportunities and implications of the trend towards opening up a banks’ own IT infrastructure, the Business Engineering Institute and Commerzbank have jointly authored an open banking white paper on the future of corporate banking collaboration. In this white paper, we explored the overarching questions of what the open banking concept is all about and how it will change value creation, particularly in corporate banking.

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Open Banking Summit 2020 – Opportunities and Implementation Scenarios for Open Banking in Switzerland

Recently, the Swiss Bankers Association published an overview that outlines the status of open banking in Switzerland and formulates requirements for its further development of open banking. These requirements include the clear strategic positioning of Swiss banks and the joint development of standardized APIs for data exchange between financial institutions and third-party providers. The aim of this overview is to “support the dialogue in the financial center”, as Richard Hess writes in the initial contribution to the blog parade of the Swiss Bankers Association. The Open Banking Summit of the standardization initiative OpenBankingProject.ch pursued the same goal on September 10th, with various presentations focusing on these two requirements.

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