A chief operating officer has a lot of work to do in a bank that faces regulatory and client demands, especially when it has recently gone through major M&A changes.

There’s been a big shift in IT spending from dealing with the compliance challenges after the 2008 financial crisis to more strategic, growth-oriented areas, the chief operating officer for REYL Intesa Sanpaolo told this news service recently. 

Even so, regulation continues to be a big topic for the group. In every new rule or procedure that comes along, the firm needs to think how to use it to gain a competitive advantage, Frédéric Le Hellard said in a recent interview. He is based in Geneva. 

About a third of Reyl’s IT spending is on new projects. In the past two years, the amount of resources devoted to cybersecurity has increased, Le Hellard said. 

As someone who has held the COO slot since early 2022 – he joined the Swiss bank more than four years ago – Le Hellard knows that new technology areas such as AI, blockchain and the “cloud” are important. 

“It is a bit too early to see the impact of AI," Le Hellard said, but Reyl is working hard to explore the impact of AI and there is a definitely a process to see what it can do. At a private bank, the point has to be remembered that clients pay for, and expect, a personal touch, he said. On the investment management side, the work on AI is “intensive.” “It has been quite impressive in performance terms already,” he said. Artificial intelligence is useful for helping risk analysis, and compliance with specific constraints though. On the compliance side, AI can help build “rules engines” that advisors can use to keep on top of news and data when it comes to onboarding clients, and afterwards.

Technology can play a part in removing, rather than adding, some of the inevitable chores that come from M&A activity and consolidation, a point that Le Hellard knows well. 

Founded in 1973, REYL & Cie manages assets in excess of SFr26 billion ($28.7 billion) and employs around 400 people. In 2021, it entered a strategic partnership with Fideuram - Intesa Sanpaolo Private Banking, a prominent European banking player, through which Fideuram ISP acquired a 69 per cent stake in REYL & Cie. That process was complex, so it was particularly important to get the tech “ducks” lined up in a row.

The business made news recently when in April when it appointed Richard Albrecht as its wealth management head. 

Tech strategy
“Right from the beginning and during the due diligence process [of the Reyl/Sanpaolo merger], an IT and operations strategy was built,” Le Hellard said.

“In parallel with the intensive work of the merger and data migration project, we delivered that same year our digital workplace, moving to the cloud, and the digital onboarding projects. Those two projects were seen as forcing devices to speed-up the merger project, both for the new employees coming from Intesa Sanpaolo as well as the REYL employees,” he continued. 

"Although we had an on-premise footprint,” Le Hellard said, “the move to Microsoft Cloud for our digital workplace strategy was a technical challenge and had so much impact in terms of flexibility and efficiency. Now we see these capabilities extended to easily exchange on the fly with a client or a colleague…it is a much better experience.” 

All along the blockchain
Work on blockchain tech is a project for the bank, Le Hellard said, which started last year. He stressed that this work is about distributed ledger technology – not cryptocurrencies such as bitcoin.

“We need to prepare the bank for the future,” he said. 

“For a bank like us, for different types of assets, funds and so on, in the future we will have to manage assets with these technologies,” he said. 

Another important Reyl project, Le Hellard said, is working on digital onboarding.

On the never-ending debate on what should be built in-house or outsourced, Le Hellard said Reyl likes to operate “in-house as much as we can.” “It’s not only about intellectual property…it is also in line with strategy. Reyl is very `niche’ and agile as a bank and if you don’t have that kind of capability in IT and operations then you can forget about being very agile from a business in standing apart. It is a challenge in terms of hiring the right skills, especially in the tech environment.”

With the pressure to crack down on money laundering and illicit funds, it is important for Reyl to deal with these problems because failures damage its reputation, and hence its clients.

The firm has been busy. As mentioned earlier, it appointed Richard Albrecht in April as wealth management head. When the group appointed Le Hellard to his current role, it also appointed Tatiana Carruzzo as head of asset services to focus on delivering excellence in custody, administration, legal representation and paying agent services for institutional investment fund clients. Carruzzo joined REYL Intesa Sanpaolo’s Asset Services business line as operations manager in 2016. In 2022 it appointed Nicolas Besson as chief investment officer.