MILAN (Reuters) – Italy’s UniCredit on Wednesday announced improvements to its mobile banking service Buddybank, in a move that Chief Executive Andrea Orcel said would ease the eventual transition to a cloud-based core banking infrastructure.
Traditional banks face the challenge of shifting their IT operations on to the cloud, moving away from a system known as mainframe whose programming language is increasingly obsolete, making it hard to recruit young staff able to work with it.
Buddybank, which UniCredit launched in 2018, currently serves 410,000 people, who were mostly newly acquired customers who did not already bank with it.
UniCredit will now offer all of its clients the possibility of switching to Buddy R-Evolution, the revamped mobile app through which it will make available all of its services and products, including for example lending.
It will also offer additional services such as real estate advice. Buddy users can count on assistance from support staff as well as advisory services from dedicated bankers.
UniCredit had managed to unify the backend structure supporting traditional commercial banking operations and Buddybank, Orcel told a press conference.
“Up until now there were two separate banks, it’s no longer so,” he said.
In presenting UniCredit’s third quarter results Tuesday, Orcel told analysts the bank would “accelerate on Phase 2 of our digital transformation … moving decisively from on-premises (IT software) to cloud with a unified and efficient way of hosting all data and applications.”
Though it beat quarterly forecast and raised its revenue outlook for the year, UniCredit failed to also hike its 2023 profit and shareholder distribution guidance, saying it needed time to decide how to best use the bumper profits.
To shift to Buddy R-Evolution, UniCredit customers have only to download the application in order to access their current account without any changes to their bank details.
A change of bank details caused disruptions this month for customers of rival Intesa Sanpaolo which is gradually shifting younger, digitally-savvy clients to its cloud-based mobile bank Isybank.
(Reporting by Valentina Za; Editing by Keith Weir)
