How embedded finance empowers online banking for the expat community

By Philipp Buschmann, CEO and co-founder of AAZZUR

As of today, there are 20 million mass affluent expat citizens of the G20 countries, 15 million of whom are EU/UK citizens. On average, they earn 250,000 euros and if they were a country, they would be the 3rd the richest nation in the world and their number is constantly growing. But taking care of your money can come with several difficulties for an expatriate.

Many Britons who live in the EU had their UK bank account closed after Brexit, just adding to the chaos of banking while being an expat. Others who live abroad found they can’t make a transaction over £10,000 without lengthy phone calls to the bank and additional paperwork. These issues are time-consuming and painful for ex-pats who quickly learn to avoid banking where they can. While some are unable to open bank accounts in their country of citizenship, others are left with too many of them.

While there are some DIY fixes to all these issues, they are often rather archaic considering the complete digitalisation of the banking industry and should not be the default of people holding such prestigious professions.

So how did it happen that expatriates have not become a targeted demographic by any digital banking app? And why is it that their needs still haven’t been taken care of?

What they truly need, is account aggregation, which would allow them to access multiple bank accounts registered in different countries on one easy-to-use platform with a unique IBAN, enabling easy money transfers across the globe.

One such company looking to improve banking for expats is B4X, a banking start-up app, which recently partnered with AAZZUR to build their platform and interface. After fully understanding these pain points AAZZUR equipped B4X with an outstanding platform offering improved user experience and customer-facing technology.

Christophe Tardivat, Co-Founder of B4X comments, “We realised that we could offer a solution that allowed multiple accounts to be accessed from one platform (account aggregation), easy money transfers, and exemplary customer service 24/7 including in-app videoconferencing, and so B4X was born.”

Mowgli Frere, Co-Founder of B4X, comments, “The B4X platform utilises open banking and PSD2 so that clients can look at all of their existing accounts on one screen, move money between accounts and see transactions. This is a game-changer for the expat market and will give them access and visibility across all of their accounts and a simplified way of moving and transferring money.”

B4X now offer clients an easy way to the bank as an expat and one of their USPs is to offer 24/7 customer service, where they will be connected with a customer service agent via video call.

Mowgli Frere, Co-Founder of B4X, adds, “With one click, clients can be connected with a customer service agent, via video call, which has hundreds of benefits for both us and the client. We are a start-up offering banking services and we have to be transparent and honest, and we feel that this will be more efficient and five times faster than a telephone call or web chat, which many find useless. This USP is also good for us as we want to learn as much as we can about our customers, and we can learn effectively via video call.”

But how is B4X different from the globally known Revolut?

While Revolut has gone from 0 to 15 million clients in just a few years and a $30 billion valuation, they are not geared up to service this number of clients. In contrast, B4X aims to focus their attention on 250,000 customers, and treat them all as VIPs.

With the technology provided by AAZZUR, B4X will always be there to help their customers rediscover how easy and frictionless banking can actually be.

Mowgli Frere, Co-Founder of B4X, concludes, “AAZZUR is our outsourced CTO. They have a very high standard of methodology and approach. They translate and transcribe the needs of existing technology tools, which is then very easy for clients to pick up and get going with it.”

The application of embedded finance to solve issues for Global Niche groups as defined by VC’s is the future of banking. We will see platforms created to solve different banking problems across many different sectors, from SMEs to job roles, to gender and more; we are embarking on the age of super-personalised banking and embedded finance is paving the way for this transition.

About Author:

Philipp Buschmann is co-Founder and CEO at AAZZUR, a one-stop-shop for smart embedded finance experience. Recognised as a rising star in the FinTech space, AAZZUR’s mission is to build profitable banking whilst empowering consumers to have access to better informed financial choices.

Philipp is a serial entrepreneur with extensive experience of working in Challenger Banking, Financial Services, IT and Energy across the world.  He took one of his business’s public – Ignis Petroleum was publicly listed in the US and Germany.

Having started as a developer in Financial Services, Philipp has first-hand experience of the banking revolution from both a technology and financial perspective. His interest in behavioural economics helped inspire AAZZUR’s revolutionary work on customer centricity in banking.