320,000 Spuerkeess customers with an S-Net online banking account will now be able to experience open banking first hand. On Tuesday, Spuerkeess, in partnership with Luxhub, announced the introduction of a new function on the S-Net e-banking space enabling its customers to consult the balance of their 'Up luncheon vouchers' account directly in their e-banking space. Not a revolution, but a rather practical service in the spirit of 'open banking': greater convenience and a consumer back at the centre of the game. "Thanks to this partnership with Spuerkeess, Up Luxembourg is continuing to innovate to improve the customer experience. From now on, Spuerkeess users can easily check the balance of their Up Luxembourg meal vouchers via the S-Net and S-Net Mobile e-banking solutions, with access to a detailed transaction history", stated Alicia Brun, Up Luxembourg's country manager.
The new option offered by Spuerkeess and Luxhub is designed to provide centralised, simplified management of personal finances. Normally, users have to log in to an account at the third-party service provider that manages an employee’s luncheon vouchers in order to check the available balance. As with the aggregation of bank accounts as part of an open banking approach, this new system relies on the consent of the user. There are a number of advantages for users, such as centralising their accounts and being able to view their overall finances on a single interface, thereby facilitating day-to-day management. In this respect, Spuerkeess is going further than open banking "with a view to beyond banking", it wrote in its press release. In other words, the bank wants to extend its offer to other sectors, as in this case with HRTech Up Luxembourg.
To take advantage of this service, customers simply need to connect to their S-Net e-banking space and then link their Up account to it, by entering their login and password, in the same way as for the aggregation of bank accounts that Spuerkeess has already developed with the support of Luxhub, now covering 26 banks. Its e-banking space thus acts as a centralising hub for the customer's various accounts.
"With the integration of the balance of Up Luxembourg luncheon vouchers into its e-banking, Spuerkeess is offering its customers an ever more comprehensive range of services, marking another step towards the era of open finance", stated Luxhub CEO Claude Meurisse. The fintech outfit Luxhub came into being on the eve of the entry into force of the Second Payment Services Directive (PSD2), as the fruit of the joint vision of four Luxembourg banks, including Spuerkeess. In terms of open banking, Luxhub is giving banks the opportunity to collaborate with fintechs and reinvent their model, ahead of the next stage in the emergence of open finance, which aims to offer an even broader and more integrated view of financial services, going beyond traditional banks to encompass wider sectors such as insurance, pensions, asset portfolios and credit.
Read the original French-language version of this news report /