How fintech partnerships, AI, and a local-first strategy are shaping the next era of financial institution transformation globally.
Raouf, with over 15 years immersed in global financial services, how has your journey led you to your current role at SBS, and what excites you most about leading the commercial strategy today?
I’ve always had a passion for client management including understanding client needs, building trust-based relationships, and creating long-term value. This has led me to spend a significant part of my career on the ground with clients across continents, listening to their challenges and co-developing solutions, which sharpened my ability to align commercial strategies with real-world expectations.
Throughout my career I’ve built and led sales teams and strategies that focus not only on growth, but on scalable, sustainable client engagement practices. This includes blending industry insight with global trends—whether it’s digital transformation, ESG, or the evolving role of data and AI in financial services—to solve real world problems for clients.
At SBS, leading the commercial strategy excites me because it’s about connecting client intimacy with global innovation, driving performance while staying true to our purpose. In this role I enjoy empowering our teams to succeed, reinforcing a culture of excellence across our clients, and translating strategy into impact.
With SBS supporting over 1,500 financial institutions worldwide, how do you approach delivering consistent yet personalized service across such a diverse global client base?
Our global reach is powered by a local-first approach to ensure every one of the 1,500+ financial institutions we support receives banking and financing solutions and expert guidance tailored to their specific business and region.
We have dedicated teams across the U.S., Europe, and Africa – covering the primary markets where our clients operate. Every financial institution we work with is paired with a team member who is dedicated to their business–someone they know, trust and can rely on and reach out to at any time. This on-the-ground presence ensures our customers not only have access to teams locally who understand market nuances and regional business needs, but experience support that feels personal and relevant.
As part of this we host many local customer events, which we’ve named our Connect event series, to bring our customers together in-person. These events offer an opportunity for senior leaders to connect with other executives, discuss market-specific trends and exchange insights. This year, we’re hosting Connect events in cities like Casablanca, London and Dallas and others. Our goal is to build our relationships with customers and also grow a community within our larger customer base
We continue to prioritize providing financial institutions with the personalized and local support they need, with the backing of a global team.
Banks today are under immense pressure to modernize—what are the most pressing challenges you’re hearing from them when it comes to digital transformation?
Banks today are facing multiple pressures at once: customers want a modern digital banking experience, while regulators are increasing demands about everything from data privacy to the speed of payments. This is all pushing banks to innovate quickly, while still maintaining the regulatory and compliance practices that allow them to operate.
This makes digital transformation especially challenging as banks need to invest in building and integrating systems that not only deliver the experiences customers want but also meet evolving regulator requirements. But that doesn’t make digital transformation impossible–far from it. Banks can modernize their technology and processes to meet both consumer expectations and regulator demands–but to do it effectively, they take a step-by-step approach, transforming one piece at a time rather than trying to overhaul everything at once.
As Tier 1 banks become more selective in their partnerships, what are the most important attributes they now look for in a fintech provider like SBS?
It comes down to one thing: trust. Banks want partners who, of course, are delivering innovative solutions that can transform and grow their business, but they’re also looking for trusted advisors to support them as part of that partnership. There are many solutions in the industry that banks can use–one of the main differentiators for them is the team behind these solutions. At SBS, we prioritize being that trusted advisor to our customers. We want to work side-by-side with our customers to help them overcome their larger pain points, offer guidance whenever they need and ultimately help their business grow. This is what builds our trust with customers and continues to strengthen our relationship with them.
How does SBS shape its solutions and new innovations to meet the evolving needs of financial institutions like Santander and Société Générale?
Banks want technology partners that offer innovative solutions and expertise that will help them to grow their business and set them apart from their competitors. And banks expect that their partners will enable them to compete in the market today–but stay ahead and as the industry changes.
We’re able to offer customers that because we’re constantly engaging them–whether that be through email and text conversations, surveys, virtual meetings or in-person events. With this constant communication, we not only fully understand our customers’ businesses and their key pain points–but we understand what they need to solve their current challenges and how we can evolve our solutions to get them there. We’re not building solutions because we think our customers will want them–we’re building them because we know exactly what our customers need to grow their business today, and tomorrow.
We continually ask for feedback from our customers to ensure they always feel like their needs are met through our solutions and service.
How are technologies like AI influencing customer expectations and shaping your strategy for delivering value across SBS offerings?
At SBS, we’re looking at AI as not only a technology to support and grow our customers’ businesses but as a way that we can innovate internally as an organization. We leverage AI-powered automation to streamline many of our internal processes at SBS, which enables us to spend less time on administrative-type tasks and spend more time with our customers to deliver even higher-quality service.
For customer service specifically, we’re seeing more use of AI to recognize patterns in customer support tickets and feedback so companies can better prioritize the issues that are affecting the most amount of customers. This allows companies to address the issues that affect a larger amount of their customers–before they become issues for other customers as well. This can also help to inform where companies need to evolve their products to meet evolving customer needs. And this is just the beginning–we’ll continue to see AI evolving in customer success to improve and personalize customer experiences.
SBS recently launched expanded microfinance capabilities for African markets—what insights drove this initiative, and how do you tailor offerings for regional needs?
Our recent microfinance expansion of our Core Amplitude product was a result of increased demand we were seeing from our customers in the Africa region. Many of these financial institutions wanted to expand their microfinance capabilities – but they felt there wasn’t a holistic solution that could meet all of their microfinance in one place.
Our global presence offers us a unique advantage when it comes to building and launching new products and offerings. Banking and technology trends tend to start in one market and then expand into others, which allows us to track these trends in one market–and build relevant solutions and grow our expertise to eventually help companies across many markets. For example, open banking took off in Europe but it is still in its early stages in the U.S. Since we’re working with EU companies on open banking, we have the expertise and foundation for solutions that will help support U.S. clients as they are gearing up for open banking to become commonplace.
Our local work in each market also ensures our solutions are uniquely tailored to not only the specific product needs of each region – but that they can also meet any relevant jurisdictional regulatory requirements.
What are some of the recurring themes or future-focused conversations you’re seeing emerge among clients at SBS-hosted events like your annual summit?
At SBS, our focus is on providing banks with the tools and guidance that empower them to streamline operations and offer a more holistic customer experience. We do this by helping them centralized and make the best use of their organizational data. Over the past 25 years, how organizations harness this data has changed – notably with the move to cloud data storage about ten years ago.
But in the past three years we’ve seen an uptick in conversations about how banks can effectively leverage AI on top of their existing data. This includes everything from how organizations can effectively store their data to optimize it for AI deployments and how they can effectively implement AI across the organization to build deeper customer relationships. Conversations around AI have dominated our client events in recent years and it will also be a key theme for our annual SBS summit, which will bring together over 200 of our clients in Paris this October.
With financial institutions becoming more digitally agile, how do you envision the relationship between fintech partners and banks evolving over the next three to five years?
Over the past several years we have seen the relationship between banks and fintechs become more symbiotic and this is a trend that’s likely to continue. Banks excel in customer trust and regulatory compliance, ensuring safety but often at the cost of innovation. Fintechs, inherently innovative and agile, develop technologies that enhance customer experiences. Combining banks’ trust and oversight with fintechs’ innovation will continue to drive partnerships in the future.
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