Oracle says it’s ready to cater to Canadian banks’ open banking needs

By Nivedita Balu

TORONTO (Reuters) -Oracle is ready to cater to Canadian banks for their open banking needs and provide tools as needed when the country make its available, a financial services executive with the cloud computing giant said.

“We are open banking ready,” Sonny Singh, executive vice president of Oracle (NYSE:) Financial Services said in an interview.

“It just depends whether the policies that Canada decides to deploy will require banks to go down that path.”

Singh was speaking at SIBOS in Toronto where fintech, financial firms and tech companies gathered to discuss sustainable finance, risk management in an unpredictable landscape, among other key topics.

Open banking allows consumers and small businesses to securely and efficiently transfer their financial data among financial institutions and third party service providers.

It is not yet available in Canada, and is available in other countries, like Australia and Britain.

“From a technology perspective, this is about having banking applications that are exposed through API and have a robust mechanism of monetization,” Singh said.

Oracle’s suite of financial products – used in 140 countries, billing and managing $500 billion in revenue – includes purpose-built products for financial services from financial crime, compliance applications and risk management.

Canadian banks are partnering with fintech firms as they look to address the banking needs of thousands of newcomers in the country and facilitate easy banking access.

Oracle already counts some Canadian banks as clients for one or many of its services, that includes cloud to enterprise applications.

The American company lost billions in market value earlier this month after its weak forecast suggested that strong competition in the cloud-computing industry and a digital spending pullback were weighing on its revenue growth.

Oracle, known for its database software, has been playing catch-up with cloud majors such as Amazon (NASDAQ:) Web Services, Microsoft (NASDAQ:)’s Azure and Alphabet (NASDAQ:)’s Google Cloud at a time businesses are dialing back tech spending over concerns about the economy.