LUXHUB and EBRC: pan-European ambitions

Yves Reding, CEO, EBRC & Jacques Pütz, CEO, LUXHUB
By M. Renotte 09/12/2019
Banking, Insurance & Fintech
Technology & Software Providers

LUXHUB helps the financial sector maximised the opportunities of the second payment services directive (PSD2). Thanks to LUXHUB’s extensive experience in the banking sector, and the support of its partner EBRC, it is building bridges between financial institutions and FinTechs, and thus opening the way to Open Banking across Europe.

In just 18 months since it was founded, LUXHUB, in record time, created a centralised API platform for banks, e-money institutions and other members of the digital financial ecosystem. It fully meets the demands of PSD2. During the EBAday 2019 event held last June in Stockholm, LUXHUB was named as the second largest European banking hub. More recently, the start-up joined the list of 100 most innovative RegTechs in the world, a prize created by the specialist research institute RegTech Analyst. For Jacques Pütz, LUXHUB CEO and Claude Meurisse, COO, this success is due to the full commitment of internal teams and external partners.

A winning partnership

"We chose EBRC for the infrastructure that underpins our systems," said Claude Meurisse. "Many reasons guided this choice, but of particular importance was how EBRC being located in Luxembourg enabled us to meet clients’ local data-hosting requirements, which is of particular importance for private banks. Furthermore, EBRC offered the security and resilience guarantees of a PFS specialised in the management of sensitive data. Other factors played a role, such as the firm's long track record being proof of its stability, and the broad range of EBRC’s quality-certified expertise."

"I was particularly impressed by the organisation and structures of EBRC teams as the project progressed," Jacques Pütz added. "As with any project, our experience changes in detail and direction," he noted, "but EBRC's consultants were very flexible and willing to listen. We were able to meet deadlines at every stage, whether this was for the sandbox or production environments. This enabled the platform to be launched on time by Finance Minister Pierre Gramegna at the Open Banking Panel event on 14th March.”

EBRC services and cloud: the catalysts of LUXHUB’s innovation

LUXHUB took another step forward in September 2019 when it launched LUXHUB One, an integration layer which gives banks access to account aggregation functionality via a unified API. By unifying API formats, the security profiles and the flows — regardless of the used Open Banking norms — LUXHUB One cuts time-to-market and enables high levels of service quality for the end-user.

“Working in a start-up organization is an exciting adventure for us, with marking and product development going hand-in-hand. We decided to work with technologies and models which will enable us to reach our innovation objectives. EBRC gives us the capacity we need to upscale easily, which is, central for our need to launch new products quickly,” Claude Meurisse explained. “This partnership brings us scalability and agility, and the capacity to plan for new services, in particular using EBRC’s Kubernetes-as-a-Service offering with its built-in security tools.

“Security is a key element of the products which we offer the financial and digital ecosystem. Gartner’s analysts predict that by 2022, hacking of APIs will be one of the most frequent attack vectors1 . Given this, we know that we can count on EBRC and its DevSecOps approach which uses a security by design approach. EBRC’s quality certification, ISO 27001 in particular, is important for us and our clients. Our suppliers’ levels of certification are always discussed during pre-contractual negotiations.

European API marketplace and road-show

LUXHUB is building a European API marketplace that will link financial institutions and the FinTech and RegTech ecosystem. LUXHUB Marketplace will offer banks opportunities to consult a catalogue of carefully selected FinTech and RegTech firms, and to test their services in a highly secure LUXHUB sandbox environment.

“As soon as our marketplace is up and running we will organise a European roadshow. We will show how our single platform connects financial institutions, FinTechs and high-quality partners such as EBRC,” said Jacques Pütz.

1 Gartner, How to Build an Effective API Security Strategy