Frequently asked questions

Part of the wider Sopra Steria family, SBS is an autonomous entity with openness and inclusivity threaded into our DNA. We’re the partner of choice for more than 1,500 financial institutions worldwide for digital and core banking and financing solutions.

We have a passion for innovation and are relentlessly focused on helping financial institutions win customer trust and achieve market-leading performance. Our customers, based in over 80 countries around the world, benefit from our technology solutions as well as the expertise of over 5,000 employees.

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The Sopra Banking Platform is trusted by hundreds of retail, corporate, and neobanks, and powers the financial journey of over 500 million consumers and businesses every day. From accounts to payments to lending and compliance, our platform enables banks to compose a new digital banking and core experience with a fully componentized, API-first, and cloud-agnostic solution.

The Sopra Financing Platform was specifically designed to support legacy banks, captives, and independents in the auto, equipment, and commercial lending sectors. Currently live in 50+ countries, our solution is a market-leading financing platform for end-to-end leasing and lending activities. Via this component-based platform, we deliver financing solutions that streamline operations and expedite change. 

Digital is now at the heart of the customer relationship, and customers have very high expectations, set by using modern tools and apps every day.

At Sopra Banking Software, we combine a long experience of banking with a strong expertise in digital. We’ve helped multiple clients, both large and small, renovate their solutions and operations from front to back, leaving them perfectly positioned to leverage new technologies and achieve their future goals.

Our products are modular and designed to combine your existing modules, partner services and SBS capabilities into a unified solution. Best of all, our orchestration layer enables a progressive transformation process, making change possible on your terms.
We offer best-in-class services, from business consulting to solution design, implementation to operations, to make your digital transformation a powerful success.

Mission
Our mission is to contribute to the financial world of tomorrow — accessible to each of us, anywhere, anytime. For centuries, our clients have been helping people to achieve their ambitions, secure their futures, and take control of their lives.
We help financial institutions to navigate rapidly changing times by acting as a guide and collaboration partner for digital transformation. Backed up by Sopra Steria Group, we have the shareholder stability, investment capacity, and technical know-how to meet this considerable challenge.

Values
At SBS, people inspire us, diversity enriches us, and a passion for entrepreneurship drives us forward. We’re open and use curiosity as a guiding light. We encourage responsibility and the audacity to explore new avenues and innovative technologies to enable transformations for the benefit of all.

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Our Brand Center is a unique place to learn about Sopra Banking Software brand, go through our graphical chart and download logos.

In a way, street art is like digital — it has little barrier to entry, it’s accessible, and it breaks the rules and challenges established ideology. That’s exactly what we love to do at SBS when it comes to creating solutions. We want to break away from traditional competitors and foster entirely new approaches. Our first aim is to encourage our teams, customers, and partners to discover new, aspirational ways of thinking.

Through our Wall in Progress initiative, we’re proud to support and showcase artists from around the world. And through their creativity, they inspire us to reach new levels of innovation.

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At SBS, we recognize that everything we’ve achieved is a reflection of the effort, ambition, and skill of our 5,000+ employees. People are our greatest asset, and we’ve worked hard to foster an open, collaborative, and rewarding work environment.
We have local teams with a global reach — our operations are currently spread across 20 countries and over 50 offices. To view current openings and explore possibilities, visit one of our geography-specific career pages:

List of Sopra Banking Software job offers in Benelux
List of Sopra Banking Software job offers in France
List of Sopra Banking Software job offers in Germany
List of Sopra Banking Software job offers in India
List of Sopra Banking Software job offers in Middle East Africa
List of Sopra Banking Software job offers in Spain
List of Sopra Banking Software job offers in United Kingdom

Customer engagement is the ongoing interaction between a bank and its customers. These relationship-building interactions, which occur across channels, foster customer loyalty and trust. Customer experience is at the heart of it all — today’s digital customers have high expectations when it comes to the interactions and experiences they have with their bank; they expect a smooth, personalized experience. To provide this, banks need to have a deep understanding of their customers. These insights can then be used to provide experiences that encourage engagement throughout the customer journey, allowing the bank to propose the right message, on the right channel, at the right time. This helps banks to boost acquisition, improve customer satisfaction, increase product sales, and retain customers.

Yes. SBS’s Offer Management is particularly appealing to banks experiencing issues such as a lack of agility in product and pricing personalization, difficulty managing and selling partner products and services, a long time-to-market new products, or inefficient marketing operations.

Offer Management helps banks create tailored offers to meet specific customer needs. It provides a system to centralize and manage a bank’s products and services, as well as those coming from their partners. Banks can customize products and services based on profile, price, duration or channel. These can then be sold separately or as neatly packaged bundles.

The Customer Onboarding module allows you to shape the process for your specific customer onboarding flow; it contains all the services and tools to create a digitized and frictionless customer onboarding process with optimal conversion rates. In terms of functional services, in addition to the processing engine, you can choose to activate facial ID recognition, e-signature, document upload/OCR, a chat bot for customer service, 2-step verification, and anti-fraud tools. These functionalities – which are all offered out- of-the-box, via a partner or our Platform – support a quick, frictionless onboarding process.

Onboarding is not just about pushing customers through to the end of the signup process. The onboarding process is key as it sets the scene for the entire customer journey, and the relationship a customer will have with their bank. Customer Onboarding allows banks to adapt the onboarding process based on customer profile and products purchased. But onboarding is just the initial step. The ultimate objective is to follow customers throughout their journey, gaining their trust, loyalty and satisfaction; all while securing digital cross-sells and upsells along the way.

Yes, SBS can provide a native mobile frontend or presentation layer. This white-labeled mobile app can be designed together with marketing or design teams. The apps for iOS and Android are natively integrated into our Digital Banking Engagement Platform.

Direct loans, guarantees, equity investments, project finance including the fiduciary aspect and budget management, syndicated loans, grants, multi-currency loans, donor and trust-funded investment, among others.

SFP provides a solid foundation of pre-configured business processes with a high fit-for-purpose and an architecture that enables flexibility to meet client specific requirements. Business processes are automated, with only exceptions left to manage. Web services provide real-time integration into the IT ecosystem so that information is available faster, with less data entry redundancy. A clear data strategy facilitates data integration and reporting.

Digital transformation often enables banks and specialty lenders to consolidate systems, improve efficiency and compliance, and build better customer relationships.

Development finance generally refers to the use of public sector resources to facilitate investment in low- and middle-income countries where investment risks are not attractive to traditional funders. The intent of these investments is to have positive social or developmental results.

Green finance refers to any structured finance product that’s intended to support an environmentally-friendly outcome.

We support the recommended Alternative Reference Rates Committee (ARRC) rates: daily simple SOFR and daily compounded SOFR. We’re also working with the development finance market, which is developing alternative calculation methods to better align with their public and private loan portfolios.

Digital banking refers to the digitization of banking services, which removes the need to visit a physical branch. Digital banking includes both online and mobile banking services; customers can access features and services via the bank’s website or mobile app. The use of paperless technologies and digital touchpoints helps banks provide customers with forward-looking, modern banking experiences. Digital banking is not limited to new institutions – traditional banks, fully digital banks, and neobanks can all offer “digital banking”.

Today, banks are forced to carve out a space for themselves in a crowded, fast-evolving digital market. Rising costs, weighty legacy systems and increasing customer expectations make this a challenging task. Digital banking — and Digital Banking Engagement Platforms in particular — give banks the flexibility needed to continuously provide a best-in-class user experience. This helps them deliver the smooth, personalized, innovative experiences their customers expect. Moreover, digital banks can give customers tools and features they may not have access to through traditional banking methods. Customers get a secure, convenient way to view and manage their finances, as well as access to communities and options tailored to their needs. Digital banking makes it easier for customers to take control of their finances, improve financial literacy, and ultimately better their lives.

Digital banking, when it’s done right, focuses on best-of-breed human-centered design to provide top-notch customer experiences. The platforms that facilitate digital banking are created to ensure fast-time-to-market new products, better operational efficiency, and a clearer understanding of customer wants and needs. What follows is a boost in customer acquisition, satisfaction, conversion, and retention. Digital banks have the technology needed to tap into new, innovative revenue streams. They can also take advantage of the cost-saving opportunities that come with cloud-native solutions delivered on SaaS. This all allows them to better compete with traditional banks, challenger banks, and big tech.

Open banking (lower case) as a general term is used to describe the practice of integrating customer banking information and financial services to provide a personalised experience. The term applies to the exposure and consumption of these services. In the European Union, the Payment Services Directive (PSD2) requires banks to open up customers’ payment account information to regulated third parties. Outside Europe, some countries have adopted/are working on equivalent regulations. Others are allowing the market to progress on these initiatives.

Open Banking is a UK regulation. It’s a secure way to give providers access to your financial information. A dedicated operating company implements and governs not only the API standard and bank staff’s actions but also the actual processes. The regulatory initiative in the EU is PSD2, which requires banks to open up customer payment account information to regulated third parties. While the UK Open Banking Standard requires a company to run the processes, PSD2 sticks to the business rules and doesn’t impose any technology.

Banks, mandated by PSD2 regulation to share customer information, can act as TPPs and benefit from open data themselves. To go further, they can choose to partner with various service providers to enrich their portfolio and propose unique, value-added offers to their customers. Simultaneously, the business ecosystem is enlarged, and the adoption of open banking leads to better interconnectivity inside the developer community.

How to expand your ecosystem with Sopra Banking Software >>

AISP (Account Information Service Provider) — An Account Information Service provides account information services as an online service to provide consolidated information on one or more payment accounts held by a payment service user with one or more payment service provider(s).

ASPSP (Account Servicing Payment Service Provider) — Account Servicing Payment Service Providers provide and maintain a payment account for a payer as defined by the PSRs and, in the context of the Open Banking Ecosystem are entities that publish Read/Write APIs to permit, with customer consent, payments initiated by third-party providers and/or make their customers’ account transaction data available to third-party providers via their API endpoints.

PISP (Payment Initiation Services Provider) — A Payment Initiation Services Provider provides an online service to initiate a payment order at the request of the payment service user with respect to a payment account held at another payment service provider.

TPP (Third Party Provider) —  Third-Party Providers are organizations or natural persons that use APIs developed to Standards to access customer’s accounts in order to provide account information services and/or to initiate payments.

All definitions

Open banking provides many advantages for various market participants, stakeholders, and consumers. 

For banks, cost minimization and competitiveness have long been considered the primary benefits. In reality, open banking is a digital transformation catalyst that enables banks to make their services usable by more consumers either directly or indirectly. Banks can then leverage customers’ trust and collaborate with various TPPs to provide new, data-driven products and services. 

For customers, open banking means easier and faster access to financial services, tailored customer journeys, and offers — and, as a result, enriched customer experience. 

For third-party providers, access to an existing customer base and their personal financial information means new, innovative services and revenue opportunities.

Benefit from open banking with Sopra Banking Software >>

The Marketplace was created with a simple goal in mind: position our customers to profit from the collective power of Fintech.
Thanks to the DBEP concept, our banking customers can easily combine all the available services (Sopra Banking and partners) and benefit from the DBEP foundational services. Services like the Authentication Brokerage, Authorization Management, and API Portal to build a streamlined and secure combination of services.

All types of payment instruments can be managed with our payment and card solutions, including prepaid cards, debit cards, credit cards, SCT, SCT Inst, SDD core, SDD B2B, international transfers, and high-value transfers. In addition, we’ve also implemented local payment methods.

Our solutions are compatible with the most significant CSM and ACH schemes. This includes Visa, Mastercard, STET, EBA Clearing, and SCL, thus simplifying connectivity. Our experience in steering end-to-end clearing projects helps banks ensure a timely roll-out and ongoing compliance.

Yes. Our solutions take into account PCI DSS rules and will be compliant with the forthcoming PCI SSF security requirements.

As a pioneer in Instant Payments and Request to Pay, SBS leverages 30 years of experience with payments and cards to offer a new generation of solutions — ones capable of meeting EPI’s challenges for the two payment instruments relying on SCT Inst: EPI card and End-to-end SCT Inst.
For more information about Instant Payments solution from Sopra Banking Software >>
Become EPI-ready with the Sopra Steria Group

Financial inclusion can be improved using open banking data, which gives a more dynamic vision of a borrower’s situation and repayment capability. We can help implement this type of client rating instrument with our digital and AI tools. More generally, the highly flexible workflow gives banks the option to monitor clients with less stable finances. Our solution also includes accessibility options such as the ability to adapt our screens to accommodate visual impairments.

Our components come pre-integrated. Therefore, you will be able to implement a full financial solution for your lending activities quickly. You can choose to implement components one-by-one, at your own pace, and benefit from the efficiency of pre-integration.

Yes, you can use a single installation to manage your financing activity in several countries or regions. The local specificities will be managed independently, but the activity will be consolidated in one place.

All types of financials can be managed with Lending Lifecycle. We have customers operating commercial, equipment, mortgage, consumer, and syndicated loans and leasing. Our solution also meets Islamic banking requirements.

We provide and maintain the granular and consolidated synthesis regulatory reporting that’s required by EMEA regulators. More precisely, we support:

● National reporting — NCB: BDF/ACPR, NBB, BCL/CSSF, BDE, BOE/FCA, BUBA, UEMOA, CEMAC, BAM, etc.
● European reporting — financial & prudential (EBA, ECB), resolution (SRB)
● Tax fraud reporting — AEoI/CRS, FATCA

Among the regulations covered are Anacredit, SHSG, COREP, FINREP, Liquidity ratio and ALMM, RUBA, Schéma A, MIR, Monetary Statistics & BSI, Balance Of Payment, Resolution (Resolution plan, LDR, CFR, FMI), MREL, TLAC, REMUNER and payment statistics (Oscamps, PST, etc.). Our solution makes it possible to produce synthetic and granular regulatory reporting in XBRL and XML format.

Our solutions can be utilized independently of our Core Banking Solution, but they offer the highest level of service when implemented with it.

Evolan Report was part of the previous generation of regulatory reporting solutions from Sopra Banking Software. Today, we offer a future-proof reporting solution that covers the regulations mentioned above.

ONEGATE is the name given by Banque de France and National Bank of Belgium to their dedicated portal for banks to make reporting declarations. Sopra Banking Software’s comprehensive regulatory reporting solution enables reporting on ONEGATE without any human action, thanks to its A2A module.

Yes, it does. Basel IV is the latest version of the bank capital requirements agreed to in 2017 by the Basel Committee on Banking Supervision. But banking regulators, especially in Europe, rejected the term Basel IV and prefer to talk about the finalization of Basel III to minimize the apparent impact on banks. The Basel Committee is now talking about Basel III finalization to allow a better appropriation by regulators and banks.

In Europe, the finalization of Basel III will be implemented in two lots. The first lot led to the CRR 2 regulation adoption on June 7, 2019, and will make the CRD 5 directive applicable from mid-2021, and the second lot (CRR 3 and CRD 6) will apply from 2023.

BIRD stands for the “Banks’ Integrated Reporting Dictionary.”
It’s a standard dictionary created by the European Central Bank (ECB) and the banking industry to provide a common description of data and transformation rules that banks must adhere to for generating the regulatory reports expected by authorities across the EU.

IReF stands for “Integrated Reporting Framework.”
It’s an integrated system currently under development by the European System of Central Banks, with a projected start date slated for 2024. IReF aims to collect statistical data at a granular level, avoiding data overlaps and heterogeneous data definitions across the EU. It’s a follow-on to the Anacredit project. And thus, it will allow the ECB to specify the statistical data requirements for deposit-taking corporations in the euro area without translating them into national collection frameworks.

Both BIRD and IReF are linked to article 430c of the CRR2 area in the feasibility report published by the European Banking Authority (EBA). The end goal of both is to alleviate the reporting burden on the banking industry.