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

Development of core banking systems in Switzerland  

In 2017/2018, the Core Banking Radar examined the eight most relevant core banking systems for Switzerland using a comprehensive methodology. In 2022/2023, the interviews with representatives of these established systems in Switzerland were repeated in order to find out how the systems have developed. This blog post highlights the four overarching activities that core banking systems have been engaged in over the past few years.

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Asymmetric cryptography and digital signatures – Part 2

The first part of this blog series introduced the concept of symmetric cryptography, which can en-sure the confidentiality of data to be exchanged. Symmetric cryptography is based on the funda-mental assumption that the key used, which is to be kept secret, must be transmitted between the communication partners via a secure channel, since otherwise third parties with knowledge of the key can access the ciphertext. Accordingly, with the help of symmetric cryptography, the problem of secret message transmission is reduced to secret key transmission only. To get around this prob-lem, this second part of the blog series presents an introduction to the concept of asymmetric cryp-tography.

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Trend Impact Radar 2023: New Trends for the Financial Industry – Part 2

The Competence Center Ecosystems regularly identifies and analyzes the most important trends impacting financial institutions and financial-related service providers. In doing so, we address the development of megatrends, macrotrends and microtrends as well as their impact on the financial industry. As a follow-up to our last blog, which focused on the megatrends and macrotrends we identified as newly relevant to the financial industry in our last internal update, today I would like to present a selection of related microtrends that relate to the topics of data, customer, employees and corporate responsibility.

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Trend Impact Radar 2023: New Trends for the Financial Industry

The Competence Center Ecosystems regularly identifies and analyzes the most important trends impacting financial institutions and financial-related service providers. In doing so, we address both the development of megatrends, macrotrends and microtrends as well as their impact on the financial industry. Today, I would like to share the four mega and macro trends that we have newly identified as relevant to the financial industry in our latest internal update: Web 3.0, AR & VR / Metaverse, Generation without Borders / Permanent Beta and Standards in Telecommunications.

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How Does It Benefit Us to View Business Ecosystems as Complex Adaptive Systems?

Our longterm goal at CC Ecosystems is to assess ecosystem processes and their impacts in a valid way that can be quantified and measured. To do this, however, we first need a suitable analytical framework: We need to delimit our object of study in such a way that its complexity is reduced to a manageable level, but at the same time no relevant features of an ecosystem are excluded from the study. Natural sciences use the theory of complex adaptive systems (CAS) to study systems that consist of interconnected elements and have adaptive capabilities in the form of adaptation and learning. In order to find out whether an ecosystem can really be considered as a CAS, we provide a comparison of the definitions and the derived properties of an ecosystem and the CAS.

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Insights from the Open Banking Summit 2022

“Financial Industry Meets BigTech”: On the 25th of August 2022, the third Open Banking Summit opened its doors in the Google event rooms in Zurich. The OpenBankingProject.ch organized this event for the third time and once again provided a stimulating get-together on the topic of open banking. The event featured national and international success stories, and the subsequent panel discussion reflected on and discussed selected topics and questions posed by the audience. Once again this year, around 120 decision-makers from the Swiss financial sector gathered to learn about current developments and to network over the subsequent aperitif.

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Core Banking Radar – “Neo Core Banking Systems and their importance for the IT Architecture of the future”

Various trends, such as an increased focus on customer interaction and embedded banking, will shape the bank of the future. To provide services along the entire “customer journey”, banks are increasingly dependent on networking with other industries. The expansion of partnerships in the ecosystem goes hand in hand with the promotion of integration capabilities via APIs and steady investment in the banking architecture. The latest Core Banking Radar article examines the system architecture of the bank of the future and, in this context, compares the four neo-core banking systems examined in earlier publications of this series.

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DeFi 2.0

Since DeFi Summer 2020, DeFi applications have become a significant trend in the blockchain industry. However, vulnerabilities of DeFi applications have also been identified over the past 24 months. The third and final part of our series “Decentralized Finance – a Hype, a Threat or an Opportunity for Regulated Financial Institutions?” takes a closer look at recent developments in the DeFi sector (DeFi 2.0) and how they address well-known challenges in the context of DeFi, such as the potential for errors when setting up smart contracts, the lack of incentive structures for investors, or the requirements for investors’ technical and professional knowledge, without compromising the strengths of DeFi applications.

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Race for the Pole Position in the Metaverse – Business Opportunities for Banks

In the media, Meta (formerly Facebook) is positioning itself very strongly as the future metaverse, and it seems as if Meta is building the “one” metaverse. This impression is deceptive. In this article, we will talk about what a metaverse is, which competitors are currently building metaverses, and what opportunities they open up for banks.

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Towards an Application-Oriented Understanding of Business Ecosystems in a Management Context

The term “business ecosystems” is not only a term used by the Competence Center Ecosystems of the Business Engineering Institute St. Gallen (CC Ecosystems), but it also attracts a large number of publications in the broader business and academic community. But what does it describe in concrete terms and what basic definition do we refer to when we talk about the development of business models within business ecosystems and the accumulation of “value” among individual actors (value capture)? In what follows, I first provide an overview of various aspects of ecosystem research. Subsequently, the focus will be on the definition of ecosystems as a specific structure of the organization of interaction in a network. Finally, implications for the work in the Competence Center Ecosystems are described.

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Opportunities & Challenges for Banks in the Context of Decentralized Finance

The term decentralized finance (DeFi) refers to a decentralized, blockchain-based architecture for processing financial transactions without intermediaries. we will show in this article why offering access to digital assets and DeFi business models is worthwhile for financial institutions and what challenges they have to overcome in order to provide such an offering to their customers. Based on practical examples, positioning possibilities for regulated institutions will be presented as well as concrete opportunities and challenges.

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9 Steps to Unlocking Business Ecosystems

The development of a business ecosystem promises the opportunity to provide existing customers with integrated services through cooperation, in some cases across industries, and to gain access to new customer groups. However, building a business ecosystem by yourself is a challenging task, as there are many parties to orchestrate around a value proposition that is attractive to all participants. To increase the chances of success for such a project, it is worth taking a structured approach that not only helps with the design of a promising solution, but also with discovering potential stumbling blocks as early as possible and, at best, avoiding them. One such approach, which is already used by several banks in German-speaking countries, is presented in this article.

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Federated Learning – Efficient Machine Learning That Respects Privacy?

In the financial industry, customers expect high standards with regard to data protection and the integrity of their own data. Nevertheless, from the perspective of value creation, it is essential for banks to evaluate customer data using statistical methods and algorithms. Banks are thus caught in a conflict between maintaining data privacy and enforcing their own business model. To address this problem, the concept of “federated learning” has become established on the market in recent years, in which the data used for model training is always stored decentrally and the models are trained decentrally.

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What Exactly Is “Decentralized Finance”?

Decentralized Finance (DeFi) has been one of the dominant trends in digital assets at least since the DeFi summer 2020. Since the summer of 2020, the digital assets community’s gaze has turned towards the possibilities of a decentralized financial ecosystem, DeFi applications have become highly popular and the prices of corresponding tokens have multiplied. Why is DeFi seen as having such great potential and what does this mean for regulated financial institutions? In the next three blogposts, I will outline these and other questions, show different perspectives and provide an outlook on the opportunities for regulated financial institutions in the context of DeFi. To get started, this blog post will outline the functionalities of DeFi applications, present selected use cases, and highlight opportunities and risks in this context.

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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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