The Intermediary – August 2025 - Flipbook - Page 26
The Interview.
SBS
Riding the wave
Jessica Bird speaks with
Eric Bierry, CEO at SBS,
about the evolution of
the business and the
lending tech landscape
G
lobal fintech company SBS
services more than 1,500
institutions across 80
countries, including the likes of
Santander, Société Générale,
and Kensington Mortgages.
It provides a cloud-native,
API-first platform that
supports core banking and lending, payments,
compliance and digital engagement.
In almost 28 years in fintech, CEO Eric Bierry
has seen this market go through many stages
of evolution – experience that he brought with
him when he joined the firm in 2016, going on
to lead the merger between Sopra Banking
Software and Axway in late 2024.
The Intermediary sat down with Bierry to
understand SBS’ recent evolution, and how
tech is shaping the future of financial services.
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The Intermediary | August 2025
To stay at the crest of the wave, four years ago
the business made the decision to transform
from a service-focused firm to a software
company. This meant moving away from a
model of bespoke tailoring for each new client,
to focusing on creating an optimised product.
Bierry says: “Our heritage is that we were
tailoring a lot of solutions for our clients,
which was seen at that time as a benefit for
them as we were doing exactly what they were
expecting. But when we looked at the speed of
the banking market, especially, the ability to go
super fast is critical; when everything has been
done very specifically for the client, the ability
to move fast becomes very difficult.
“We wanted to rationalise the way we were
going to market, and which products have to be,
let’s say, ‘protected’ for the future.”
This was not a change that happened easily
or overnight, he adds: “It took us nearly three
years to pilot the company within that new
strategy, and ensure that our clients were not
only following our strategy, but accepting the
plan to standardise a lot more.”
The rationale to make this change, in the first
instance, was to improve business outcomes
for clients, but it also had the added benefit of
allowing SBS to reduce costs and improve its
own business performance.
Building bricks
In the UK, SBS has a particularly strong
grounding in providing software solutions for
the building society market, numbering 21
clients in that sector alone. The willingness
of building societies to engage with modern
technology strategies might surprise some,
considering their lower profit margins and
physical roots in both communities and
historical processes.
For Bierry, the two are not mutually exclusive,
particularly as SBS respects the traditions that
underpin the mutual model.
He explains: “There is a very strong
competitive advantage that building societies
have in the market, which is the ability to really
engage physically, closely with their members.
“Of course, many other big financial players
are compensating for their inability to be
