Arnaud Penson (Ebury): Understanding banking challenges in luxembourg
Arnaud Penson, representing Ebury, a UK-founded fintech with 1,800 staff in 40 offices, discusses their global expansion, Luxembourg market entry, digital evolution, and vision to lead in cross-border finance, focusing on compliance, advisory, and solving local banking challenges.
Could you briefly introduce your company?
Ebury is a Fintech with UK origins and a global presence. Since 2009, we have now grown to nearly 1800 employees across 40 offices worldwide, backed by our majority shareholder Banco Santander since 2019. Indeed, our motto being “What Borders?” demonstrates precisely what we aim to do: provide global treasury solutions for corporate and institutional clients that operate cross-border. We offer cash accounts, payments, FX and fund financing in Luxembourg and in all other fund jurisdictions. What we found here, and what we have capitalised on the last few years, is the glitch in the matrix in Luxembourg specifically: the tremendous difficulty for Luxembourgish corporate and institutional clients, to open cash accounts. Something you've been very vocal on too, Jérôme.Whilst I believe we are now an important part of the local ecosystem in Luxembourg, we maintain strong ties with other financial centers across the globe.
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“We are more than just a provider now.”
How are the needs of your clients evolving, and how do you adapt to meet these changes?
Our clients, as well as the financial world, have been more and more reliant on digitalisation, as well as global interconnectivity. They are also more open to work with non-banks for financial services, often due to the clients using these type of institutions for their own personal use, think “Revolut” and others. Moreover, nobody in the corporate and institutional space is allowed to ignore what’s happening globally anymore: political landscapes are evolving quickly, economies and currencies stumble overnight and the regulatory obligations change quickly. Our clients need more guidance than ever on how to navigate complex macro-economic situations, with a focus on security, fraud prevention and using a partner that can understand complex structures some clients might have. Being present all over the world, provides us a bird-eye view of all these requirements and allows us to provide real value to clients, like instant transactions, custom approval workflows or complex FX hedging. I would be tempted to say that we are more than just a provider now, we’ve really taken on an advisory role for certain types of clients. On the digital side, clients have been used more and more to instant availability of services, which often poses several challenges for the service provider, from an operational and compliance perspective. We have always built out our products and capabilities keeping in mind a key mission, maximising efficiency throughout the lifecycle of a client.
What is your company’s vision for the next five years?
We have a pretty solid international footprint now. I think our challenge and objective is to strengthen our local offering where demand is high, with boots on the ground. Solving local problems, like the cash accounts in Luxembourg, is a good way to have prime access to certain segments and industries and will remain at the core of our offering as long as these problems persist. Future growth, however, will come from demonstrating to clients in Luxembourg and elsewhere the full extent of our products and services, like providing risk management tools on currencies, global cash management solutions, instant payments across jurisdictions and many other solutions we provide already or will provide in the future… As mentioned, the future lies in global financial interconnectivity and integrated treasury products. We want to be at the forefront of it. It’s in our DNA.