Customer interview with the neo-bank NICKEL
“XREC is a major element of the control tower for verifying the correct accounting of financial transactions.”
Testimonial from Olivier JEAN
CEO at NICKEL
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Like other banks, NICKEL has chosen to modernize its financial controls in order to reduce operational risks.
Olivier JEAN – Deputy Managing Director at NICKEL and Ronald MOUNIEN – Finance IT Project Manager at NICKEL share in this interview their experience with our XREC solution which supports them in the control and reconciliation of financial and accounting data.
Tell us about the neo-bank Nickel ?
NICKEL is the leading French neo-bank with over 1 million accounts opened.
It is a company that started its activity a little over 6 years ago with a very simple principle of being able to offer an account, a bank account number and a card in 5 minutes at a tobacconist.
Today, we are the 3rd French banking network with just over 5,700 tobacconists open throughout France. It is a success story that continues very strongly with very strong growth prospects, particularly internationally.
XREC is a major element of the control tower for verifying the correct accounting of financial transactions.
Testimonial from Olivier JEAN
CEO at NICKEL
The overhaul of the NICKEL IS, a key step ?
To support our international ambition of opening 7 countries in Europe by 2024, one of the prerequisites for us was, indeed, to overhaul our accounting system to retrieve information from our core banking in our IS.
Our goal is to have scalable solutions, solutions that we can implement very quickly with an opening rate of 2 to 3 countries per year. The key words are scalability, speed of execution and reliability of our systems, this is what will allow us to then monitor our customers’ transactions.
Why did you choose the CALIXYS XREC solution ?
Since 2015, we have been working with CALIXYS, it is a partnership that was built to meet the needs of reconciliation and a certain agility in the tool.
When we identified which solutions could be used to meet our need to change our Finance IS. We tried to “benchmark”, we realized that the XREC solution from Calixys met NICKEL’s needs.
Among the clear advantages of XREC, we have the responsiveness of the team when we need to implement developments, the strong capacity of XREC to be able to manage data, to restore it and to manage the reconciliations with a certain speed.
Tell us a little about cloud and security
To quickly deploy our solutions, we use cloud solutions with the advantages of the cloud but also with the risks associated with this type of technology, in particular, around security, indeed, as we will handle relatively sensitive data in these tools.
It is essential for us to ensure that the data is processed with the greatest security whether at the hosting level, at the data processing level and the hosts’ processes.
Historically, we use CALIXYS solutions which have been able to show us, indeed, in terms of security all their robustness and so it is natural that the choice turned to CALIXYS to continue this project.
We have the responsiveness of the team when we need to implement developments.
Testimonial from Olivier JEAN
CEO at NICKEL
In terms of improvement, what has the XREC solution been able to bring to NICKEL ?
CALIXYS has developed a robust and efficient digital platform for controlling and reconciling financial flows that is already used by major reference accounts in the Paris market processing very large amounts of data.
The XREC cloud platform is completely flexible and perfectly adapted to the complexities and challenges of companies in both the financial management and market finance fields. The solution is also used and adapted to clients of all sizes due to its economical, simple and intuitive nature.
Do you have anything to add ?
With regard to the Finance IS project, in particular, the migration of the Finance IS, the work that was done with CALIXYS was very interesting and very constructive. We had in front of us a team that was very responsive to our needs with strong involvement and advice that was permanent.
Today, we have a solution that fully meets our needs and we also have development prospects in which CALIXYS is attentive. It is a project that was very well managed with the CALIXYS team.
In addition, it was a relatively complex project with many stakeholders, a lot of synchronization, and many batches that had a lot of overlaps.
On this, CALIXYS has always been on time with the expected quality, as I said in the steering committee we never talk about trains arriving on time, but CALIXYS has always arrived on time and it is a real comfort for us.
Compared to the company’s strategic project, we were indeed able to configure Spain in record time, which will allow us to open the activity on time and in the coming weeks.
It is the 1st of the international countries with a lot of success that awaits us in the future and to continue the partnership with CALIXYS.
