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 , 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.