Innovation is central to our organization

For Groupe BPCE, innovation is a collective state of mind that necessarily involves all our employees and permeates all our brands and business activities.

Innovation is not necessarily disruption or new invention; it is also the improvement of existing processes and systems and the seeking out of new partners to develop our presence in new value-creating markets.  Our goal is constantly to provide more effective responses to the expectations of our customers and employees.

On the strength of this conviction, innovation is one of the three key principles of BPCE 2024, our new strategic plan designed to make our group a leader in banking, insurance, and asset management for the benefit of all.

Our ambition? To draw on our collective strengths to be increasingly innovative, to inspire new ideas and new ways of working, and to share them in our pursuit of a simplified, optimized banking experience with a wealth of new services.

Increasingly more innovative in digital solutions and data

Thanks to our successful Digital Inside strategy, we have now made digital solutions an integral part of all our banking and insurance businesses… and we have done so in pursuit of two objectives:

  • To make things simpler for our customers when handling their day-to-day banking operations (making credit transfers, adding new beneficiaries, categorizing expenses, managing their bank cards, etc.) and pursuing their life projects (procedures for taking out home loans or signing up for consumer credit, or equipment loans for professionals, etc.) while simultaneously providing them with optimal security (strong authentication, etc.).
  • Also to make things simpler for our customer advisors to help them provide value-added advisory services.

Inspired at all times by this innovative mindset, our ambition now is to speed up the pace of change notably in support of the digitalization of retail with new tailor-made digital services.

Our innovative capacity should now allow us to enter a new era defined by data and artificial intelligence: an innovative, ethical and secure use of data to assist our customer advisors, to enhance relationships with their customers and, more generally, to serve all the business activities of banking and insurance. Innovation is key to enabling us to provide our customers with even better support at key moments in their lives.

Because our innovative spirit is also inspired by openness, we are resolutely committed to cooperating with the most innovative players. This approach should enable us to achieve our ambitions in new technological markets such as open banking, cybersecurity, the green economy, coaching in expense and savings management, etc.

Offering customers new value-added services that complement those we already provide thanks to partnerships with non-banking players, working with innovative companies selected for the quality of their value propositions… are some of the opportunities promised by open banking. This approach also means opening up our own services to our partners via secure APIs to enable them to offer our solutions their own customers.

  • Open Data: the 1st banking group in France to make public data sets derived from its entities available to the general public. More than 170 public data sets are available.
  • Open API approach: running the Open API web portal and creation of the API Thinking collective

Discover Groupe BPCE’s tech, digital and data initiatives

Discover Open Data made by BPCE

Discover the 89C3 API web portal

Increasingly more innovative in our offers and services

Our Group and its companies are constantly innovating to provide all their customers and partners with services and solutions ever more closely tailored to their individual needs and keeping pace with changes in society.

  • Adoption of the Green Weighting Factor. This in-house capital allocation mechanism is designed to favor the most environmentally and climate-friendly financing. It also makes the Group’s financing more closely aligned with the objectives of the Paris Agreement.
  • Launch of Impact loans to promote the social or environmental commitment of customers in the real estate and social housing sectors.
  • Participation of Groupe BPCE as a founding shareholder in the European Payment Initiative (EPI), a pan-European payment solution.

Increasingly more innovative to shape the future of work

Groupe BPCE has also made innovation central to its corporate strategy to anticipate changes in the world of work and in its business activities, to meet the new needs of its 100,000 employees, and to attract new talent: training and recruitment systems, the organization of work, skills enhancement programs, professional mobility, interaction between colleagues, induction of new recruits, etc.

  • Creation of employee communities within the Group to encourage exchanges, creativity, adaptability and, in the process, enhance the value of the different business lines: Digital Ambassadors, Digital Champions, Data Management Officers, Chief Data Officers, etc.
  • Organization of challenges, in-house hackathons and external events making it possible to gain new perspective and to make the most of multidisciplinary resources and life experiences: Group Coding battleInnove Ta Banque (‘Innovate Your Bank’)Operation In’2 Job, etc.
  • Creation of the BPCE Campus: a corporate culture, set of behaviors and processes to train employees for the future orientation of our business lines

Innovating to enhance collective efficiency and improve the employee experience is also the ambition of the Well program, a decentralized collaborative approach aimed at setting up, in each of our Group’s companies, workspaces, operating and management methods appropriate to hybrid ways of working.

13.5 million customers logged on to our digital channels in the last 12 months

4.7 Top App Store rating for the Banque Populaire and Caisse d'Epargne applications (Category: retail banks)

Béatrice Lafaurie Head of Human Resources (July 2021)
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