MoneyLive 2019: Here Mobility to help banks react to Uber and Grab's financial play

MoneyLive 2019: Here Mobility to help banks react to Uber and Grab’s financial play

Written by Ruby Hinchliffe
26th November 2019

Looking to the big techs like Uber and Singapore’s Grab, fellow transport technology firm Here Mobility tells FinTech Futures at Money Live Summit 2019 why it too is turning to the financial services industry.

Instead of creating its own empire, the technology provider will help banks compete with a white label solution.

MoneyLive Summit 2019 in Westminster, London

Here Mobility’s head of payments Oded Salomy believes “entering financial services as a standalone proposition” was a good move for the likes of Uber, which lost $5 billion in the last quarter.

Salomy’s next question, however, is what are banks going to do in response?

“What we’re doing is we’re trying to switch it, we’re trying to tell financial institutions: ‘instead of waiting to be disrupted by mobility players who are entering financial services, use our platform as a white label solution integrated into as your banking app or digital wallet to enter mobility'”.

Here Mobility, based in Amsterdam, is a division of Here Technologies – a company which develops cloud-based GPS mapping solutions and is majority-owned by a consortium of German automotive companies including Audi, BMW, and Daimler.

The Mobility arm is effectively an online marketplace for all forms of transportation, connected to 2.4 million vehicles across 80 countries.

Anticipating that “mobility players will be smart about how they use that data, probably more willing to take credit risks and offer more creative customised financial offerings than traditional financial institutions”, Salomy uses the example of how mobility data can create more opportunities for loan providers.

“If they [the loan applicant] has been commuting to the same workplace every day for the last five years I might feel more comfortable giving them a loan.”

Here Mobility’s head of payments Oded Salomy

However, he also notes the major benefit banks have over big techs doing banking. “We don’t know how good they [big techs] will be at managing financial risk,” he says, noting that Uber Money launched with the help of multiple financial institutions because “it recognised how difficult complex financing financial services can be”.

By bringing mobility technology to the banks, Salomy believes this will help the two industries embrace each other. “What we’re really happy about is that we’re seeing our message resonate with a lot of financial institutions which understand this merging of industries is going to happen.”

In recent weeks and months Here Mobility has been “focusing on financial partnerships”. Having announced its strategic partnership with Wirecard earlier this month to capitalise on the payment and geolocation services, the company is also about to announce its partnership with two Latin American banks.

Salomy says Here Mobility’s presence at Money Live Summit 2019 this week is part of this financial partner search. “Here at the conference we’re speaking with additional players in the financial ecosystem that could be interested in working with us.”