This will enable customers in Poland and Romania to leverage a modern, comprehensive banking experience with digital accounts and debit cards.
Building from Marqeta’s global card issuing platform, Raiffeisen Centrobank developers will be able to benefit from Marqeta’s speed and scale to build a new digital banking service on a fast-tracked timeline and accelerate roll out of the product in various European markets. Raiffeisen Centrobank will be able to benefit from Marqeta’s transparent approach to integration and comprehensive open application programming interface (APIs), with plans to create an end-product with modern design and delivery. Customers of the new brand Raiffeisen Digital Bank will be able to access their accounts through mobile devices, have access to contactless phone and card payments and keep track of transactions.
The degree of digitisation of the Polish banking sector is above the global average, a study by the consulting company Deloitte has shown. The ‘Digital Banking Maturity 2022’ report is based on an analysis of 304 banks in 41 countries.
According to the report, one of the advantages of the Polish banking sector is the ability to open an account using a smartphone and a banking application. This option is offered by 80% of Polish banks, whereas among global digital leaders this figure is lower by as much as 13% points, the study found.
Polish banking system is a relatively ‘young’ one that began its most rapid developments after 1995 and 2000. It could be described as modern and innovative in terms of its fast growth in digital and mobile payments and its approach. In the last three to five years, Polish banks have made an effort to increase the importance of digital channel usage.
Romania already registers thousands of Open Banking users and an exponential increase in the number of accesses to banking APIs in the first quarter of 2022, one and a half year after the first commercial implementation. The Finqware platform, the first local banking data platform under the European PSD2 regulation, has registered over 10,000 active users of bank account query services.
Moreover, Romanian banks invested, in 2021, over EUR 200 million in process automation, amid the pandemic. As a result, 60% of them offer full-online services, including account opening, compared to 25% in 2019, according to a FinnoScore report compiled by the consulting company Horváth.
However, Romania stands out as having one of the EU’s least developed systems of online public services, which contrasts with its extensive telecommunications infrastructure offering very fast and cheap access to the network. This is due both to the policy of the governments, which until 2019 did not show much interest in the digitisation process of the country or failed to propose a comprehensive programme for its implementation, and to the resistance of the public, who were distrustful of the e-government solutions offered.
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