Oireachtas Joint and Select Committees
Tuesday, 10 July 2018
Joint Oireachtas Committee on Finance, Public Expenditure and Reform, and Taoiseach
Matters Relating to the Banking Sector: KBC Bank
2:00 pm
Mr. Wim Verbraeken:
There is obviously a great deal of talk about FinTech, neobanks and new entrants in the banking market. What we were referring to in our opening statement was our ability to integrate the contribution of the specific expertise of specialist FinTech firms into our offering. I refer, for example, to the app that we launched recently, with which a customer can open a current account online in five minutes and five steps, as my colleague indicated. Part of that process is proof of identity, and we use the services of a FinTech firm to compare a selfie with this kind of photo ID. This is not something that we have developed in-house. We use the best-in-class technology available in the market and we integrate it into our app. This is just one example of the multiple possibilities. A lot of these new firms are really experts in sometimes narrow areas of our business, and we believe that there is a degree of complementarity between what we do and what they do.