Profile

Location

Amsterdam

Member since

2010

Writes about

Payments Financial inclusion

Arjeh's blog archive

2023 (1) 2022 (1)

Arjeh Van Oijen

Head of Product Management at Icon Solutions

Message Posts: 3 Comments: 36

Career History A 30 plus year background in selling, architecting and implementing solutions related to payments, corporate banking, digital channels and core banking.

Blogs

EBAday

EBAday 2023: Asking banks…do you feel in control?

14 Jun 2023

Just over a year ago, my colleagues and I offered a few predictions about developments and trends in global payments and banking, intended to help financial institutions shape their strategy for the year ahead. We suggested that, after a year of changes across the financial services industry, 2022 would be the year banks focus on innovative strate...

Banking

Is ‘Low Code’ the Secret to Payments Transformation?

24 Mar 2023

It’s a transformative time for the payments industry. The development of innovative payments methods and technology has changed marketplace dynamics, pushing new players into the spotlight and shifting the focus of payments services. With agile, nimble and future-focused fintechs leading the charge, payments processing is no longer simply about tr...

Cryptocurrency Insights

The benefits of using DLT for digital currencies

12 Apr 2022

Central banks across the globe are exploring and testing Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT) to provision Central Bank Digital Currencies (CBDC). In this blog, Arjeh van Oijen, Head of Product Management, and Atul Verma, Senior Payments Architect at Icon Solutions, explore how DLT overcomes the restrictions of existing financial infrastructures, t...

See all Arjeh's blogs

Arjeh is Commenting on

Banks choosing to build and not buy tech, suggests survey

I'm not surprised and it confirms what we have experienced in the market. Note that this survey is related to cororate banks and not retail banks. Corporates expect banks to meet their specific needs and if not, they switch to a bank (or Fintech company) that can. Large corporate banks have bad experiences in being locked in by 'closed' system from software vendors. When the bank wants to implement a specific feature that the vendor's product doesn't cover, it completely depends on that vendor to have it added (or not). To avoid this dependency, an increasing number of banks has plans to build their own technology stack/frameworks on basis of which they can build their own specific functionality. But this is easier said than done. Building a mature and proven framework takes easily 4 to 5 years before its is mature enough for a widescale implementation and requires many millions of investment. Not mentioning the risks of failure or rework that comes with it. But there is also good new. New generation technlogy frameworks from vendors offer banks the best of both worlds. The bring a proven, mature and ready to use domain (e.g. payments) specific frameworks with a large amount of out-of-the-box functionality, but based on an open architecture that allows the IT team of a bank to add the bank's own specific functionality/features without being dependent on the vendor. This approach saves the banks a lot of time, investment and risk, but at the same time offers the same amount of flexibility and vendor independency as a complete self build from scratch. Interested? Please, do not hesitate to contact us.

21 Jul 2022 Reply Read article

Will trust woes undermine Open Banking under PSD2?

I fully agree with Steve's statement on the 'secure enclave of the mobile phone'. This technology is already used by payment schemes like Apple Pay and Android Pay. The key issue is that this capability is not made available/accessible to any party/App, but only to the ones that are permissioned by the owner of the phone eco-system. The question is whether legislation should be created that force the owners/controlers of the phone eco-system to open up the 'secure enclave' to any party that wants to make use of it, in the same way banks (ASPSP) have been forced to open up the payment account. The application area and value of this 'secure enclave' goes way beyond payments, but can be applied for every type of (2F) authentication and digital signing.

07 Nov 2019 Reply Read article

ECB Exec: Libra has been a "wake up call" for central bankers

The Libra is a stable coin that can only be acquired by bringing in a deposit in a fiat currency. From that perspective it does not create a new asset or money, it is only another appearance of fiat currency, similar to bank notes. The interesting part is that it is not linked to one fiat currency (like most stable coins), but to a basket of multiple fiat currencies. The most well known basket currency so far has been the ECU (European Currency Unit, which was the stepping stone to the Euro), another one is the SDR. Important benefit of a basket currency is that the rate movements against the individual fiat currencies in the basket are smoothened and less volatile than the rates between the fiat currencies. At the end of the day the total value of all Libras that have been sold, must be covered by the deposits that have been made by the buyers of the Libra in the different fiat currencies.

19 Sep 2019 Reply Read article

Finma updates stable coin guidance as Facebook's Libra hovers into view

In my perception a stablecoin backed with deposits of underlying fiat currency (or in case of Libra the currencies that are part of the basket) would fall in the EU under the e-Money institution directive. Any thoughts or PoVs on this?

11 Sep 2019 Reply Read article