Become
your own
fintech entrepreneur

“In brief, all our customers can program their own apps and online banking solutions. We have opened parts of our APIs so that our customers can program and develop functions themselves, based on their own data,” says Christoffer Hernæs, Chief Digital Officer at Sbanken. 

The philosophy of Sbanken has been that the customer should be his or her own bank manager. Seventeen years on since the bank started its operations, the developers and not the bank manager are the new role models.

“Our own developers who have access to the portal have already developed some exciting functions in their spare time, and we are looking forward to what’s to come in the future. Hopefully, there will be a lot of weird things, and a lot of good things that we would have not thought of ourselves. There are a lot of talented and creative developers out there who unfortunately do not work for us yet, and this is an opportunity to let these customers show us what they think a digital bank should look like,” says Hernæs.

Sbanken would like to reward the best functions and develop them further as part of Sbanken Beta, providing they meet the security and quality requirements. 

“By opening our APIs, our developer portal becomes a unique approach to open banking,” says Hernæs.   

Sbanken and Quantfol.io
Sbanken has also chosen to acquire a stake in Quantfolio with a view to developing a leading robot advisory service

“We have wanted to do this and considered various possibilities, such as developing it ourselves, licensing the product from a third party, or looking for an environment we could collaborate with. After an extensive search, we found that the solution was located in the same city as us,” says Hernæs.

Sbanken will have exclusive rights to the core product, which is a robotic investment engine for the Norwegian market, but they are passionate about Quantfol.io succeeding internationally. 

“As the chairman of Quantfol.io, it is important to push for Quantfol.io not only being a supplier to a single Norwegian bank, but also having the opportunity to scale internationally,” Hernæs adds.

“Developing for an international market will become more important in the future, and we hope that Finance Innovation will stimulate the banks to think more in that direction. We must join forces to address common challenges and help ensure that Norwegian financial technology realises its potential as an export product,” says Hernæs.