Since its creation in 2015, Wecan has worked with financial and non-financial institutions to optimize the processing of their data while guaranteeing its security. Building on its flagship product Wecan, the company is reaching a new milestone with the arrival of Arab Bank Switzerland within Wecan Group. Vincent Pignon, executive chairman of Wecan, presents this new collaboration to us.
Arab Bank joins the Wecan Group network. How did this collaboration come about?
Our Wecan solution is very widely used by wealth management players in Switzerland because of the significant advantages it offers to improve the quality of compliance data and the operational efficiency of the associated processes. This allows us to be in continuous contact with all players in the Swiss market and beyond.
In the particular case of Arab Bank Switzerland, given the capital relationship with Gonet, which is a Wecan user and a member of the Blockchain Association for Finance, a cooperation seemed quite obvious to us, all the more so as we were genuinely impressed by the visionary nature of their digital strategy, particularly in the field of digital assets.
We therefore fairly quickly concluded on both sides that a collaboration would be mutually beneficial. The initial scope will be their business with independent wealth managers, but the potential over time is much broader.
Collaborations between Western banks and those of the Middle East seem siloed. Your example demonstrates the opposite. Can you tell us more?
We make no distinction based on the geographic origin of our clients. On the contrary, in the case of foreign banks with a subsidiary in Switzerland, as is the case for Arab Bank Switzerland, we even offer particularly relevant use cases that notably allow their foreign booking centers to communicate compliance information and documents much more efficiently with their booking center in Switzerland. This considerably facilitates the handling of their multi-booked clients, avoids asking them for the same information over and over, and improves regulatory monitoring at a global level.
Can you remind us of the principle of the Wecan platform and the value it brings?
Wecan is a compliance data exchange platform. You can simply imagine it as a private network on which financial institutions (e.g. banks, external asset managers, trustees, stock exchanges, etc.) exchange KYC and KYB data in a secure, standard and multilateral way.
In very practical terms, once an institution is onboarded onto the network, we provide it with a digital vault through which it can send, collect (or both) compliance data according to precise data structures.
Wecan is based on a blockchain architecture, the use of artificial intelligence to considerably optimize the exchange of structured data, distributed data storage and end-to-end encryption to guarantee the security of the storage and exchange of data and documents.
Wecan is a very rich solution, but if I had to summarize its added value in 3 points I would say it is: better quality of compliance data with real-time updates; a significant improvement in the operational efficiency of processes related to compliance data exchanges; and securing the data and documents of all members of the network.
What message would you like to convey regarding blockchain and its application cases?
Regarding the use of Blockchain, I think two things are important:
First, yes, Blockchain has very concrete use cases and we are the perfect embodiment of this. In our case, Blockchain makes it possible, for example, to guarantee the auditability and immutability of compliance data exchanges on our platform. It works as follows: each piece of data or document recorded on our infrastructure is tokenized. Its digital fingerprint is recorded on the blockchain. And in the event of a change, this fingerprint is new. No traditional database could guarantee this level of data traceability.
Nevertheless, it should be remembered that any technology (Blockchain, AI or others) is never an end in itself but rather a means of delivering value for certain clients within the framework of specific use cases. Our USP is also based on other technologies such as AI or Zero Knowledge, and it is the combination of these different technologies and our understanding of our clients' business that creates value.
Data has become the new black gold. How can its quality be guaranteed and constantly improved?
Our vision is that the tokenization of data will be one of the strongest trends of the coming years. It will make it possible to know who the owner is, with whom it is shared, to decide whether or not to monetize it, to delete it to meet regulatory requirements, and it will open up new business models.
But this obviously implies that this data is of high quality. In the specific case of Wecan, the uniqueness of the data allows all players in the network to consult the same data. Thus, if it is reviewed by 4 compliance departments, the probability of having errors is much lower. This ensures better data quality and a reduction in risks. But what is even more interesting is that each update or change of circumstance is shared with all consumers of this data. It is a paradigm shift because until now, one of the major challenges for financial institutions has been to update compliance data.
Moreover, this way of working also solves one of the major challenges for financial institutions, which is to carry out periodic reviews for KYC and KYB. With Wecan, we offer a systematic and real-time compliance audit with the blockchain. Whereas before, audits (internal and external) were carried out randomly (on samples) and after the fact. It is a paradigm shift that brings a substantial ROI on these tasks.