Let's talk Bank-as-a-Service in days before BaaS
AXA is a well-known world-wide insurer. In 2007-2008, it had a bank-insurance vision, only as long as the banking products would not create problems for its insurance products. And so did we start on a Journey, to design BaaS back when APIs where not yet adopted by banks.
Designing the Target Operating Model of such a bank that could be replicated in any country around the globe in less than 4 months and for less than 4 million euros ? We succeeded, started at the second iteration only. First iteration lasted 9 months, and costed 9 million euros. Still good, according to our standards.
The objective was to automate the bank as much as possible, and when it was not possible to automate, then an operational service could be used by the Insurance companies: the Banks all had the same Operations Back-Offices, Editing Services, Scanning Facilities, Call-Centers, and Chat-Centers. Multi-language, cross-countries, with agreements signed by all Post Offices in the EU: our teams could be dispatched just about anywhere and start working even from home.
How did we do that ?
We used... Citrix. We called it "Bank-in-a-Box", and not yet "Bank-as-a-Service", because from a technical point of view, the bank existed as a running application on servers in Zurich (for data-protection reasons): anyone anywhere could emulate this application via a secured Citrix connexion. So the bank was in a sort of a box; a Citrix-box.
That's how we saw ourselves, until the Insurance CEOs accross the world started to ask us to also operate the banking services (KYC, Loans' Risk Assessments, Cards Issuing, etc.) and they would only pay per service.
That's when we created teams, regionalized where it made sense, that would operate for a few countries from the same location.
That's how we came to Banking-as-a-Service way before banks started to look at the notion of drafting an API-Gateway... This, they did when the Regulator forced them to, with DSP2 - but that's another story.
https://fr.slideshare.net/slideshow/operational-excellence-abe-model/3291383
Picture by Julius Silver on Pexels