French banking major Credit Agricole has revealed plans to invest €15bn (£13.3bn) in technology over the next four years to achieve “greater efficiency”.
Credit Agricole said that it wants to align its technological fundamentals with the best standards on the market. In this pursuit, the bank wants to see 90% of its group entities to have a data-centric architecture in 2022 and achieve €300m (£265.97m) in increased efficiency in IT.
The agricultural sector-focused bank is targeting to see 100% of its IT staff pick up new technologies at the new IT University. Furthermore, the bank wants to test 100% of emerging technologies for its business lines.
The banking group aims to grow the number of customers using its digital applications in France and Italy by 20 points by providing them an exceptional digital customer experience.
Credit Agricole said that it will try to provide tools and applications at the best standards to its customers across all markets.
The bank will also work on ensuring that its products and services are adapted to new customer habits. It also wants to leverage data for better understanding of its customers and to become their trusted third party.
The bank will allocate investment for innovative strategy of banking and extra-banking services platforms, which will be operated directly or with partners.
In regional banks, it will introduce platforms for business creation, for the management of non-profits, for healthcare services, and for car financing from this year onwards. Starting from 2020, the regional banks will provide platforms offering support for job finding, for housing, and also a digital data vault.
Credit Agricole also announced an investment of €450m (£398.95m) in its payments business between 2019 and 2022. Another target for the bank is to capture market share in France and Europe with digital and mobile payment solutions for small and medium-sized merchants, a pan-European electronic payments solution for Tier1 merchants, and an e-commerce solution to be offered from this year.
Recently, Crédit Agricole signed a memorandum of understanding (MOU) with Spanish bank Santander to merge their custody and asset servicing operations into a new entity. In this connection, the new entity will merge Crédit Agricole’s custody and asset servicing business – CACEIS with the Spanish, Brazilian, Mexican and Colombian activities of Santander’s S3.