EBRC strengthens its European position

Set up your business in europe/Success Story EBRC strengthens its European position

The digital market is evolving, worldwide, in Europe and in Luxembourg. IT providers have to adapt. EBRC, a service provider for IT and cloud solutions specialised in the management of sensitive data, is pushing forward its international growth through a stake in Digora (France).

EBRC’s ambitions go far beyond the borders of the Grand Duchy. The first letter of its acronym - European Business Reliance Centre - proves it. “We built our business model and strategy starting in Luxembourg to support the development of our customers across Europe, says Yves Reding, CEO of EBRC. In an environment that is quickly changing, we reaffirm our position ever more confidently. Today our European ambitions are gaining a new dimension, with our stake in Digora, a business that is complementary to our own and that works mainly on French territory in the field of data management.”

Digora is indeed an expert in the effective use of data and has seven branches (Paris, Strasbourg, Lille, Lyon, Rennes, Bordeaux and Toulouse) as well as two subsidiaries in Morocco and Luxembourg. The company has about one hundred employees whose skills are recognised in France as belonging to one of the best teams in terms of servicing databases for best performance (Oracle, Microsoft, NoSQL,...).

A transformation based on data

For the CEO of EBRC, this development is a logical consequence of the evolution of the market. “Nobody can deny the growing digitalisation of the economy, with business developments that are accelerating on all levels. In this context, companies have to rely on strong IT partners that integrate the necessary skills and allow them to access greater agility.” In recent years, EBRC moved up the value chain to set itself up as a single point of contact able to meet the digital needs of each customer. “We support them, often starting with a blank page, in the design of their own model and their own digital platforms. We help them transform and adapt their business model to increase efficiency”, explains Yves Reding.

Accompanying complex projects

For example, EBRC currently works on the implementation of a digital bank of a new kind, a bank built from scratch and destined to quickly serve up to 20 million potential users. ‘‘We are able to implement and operate the IT side of such complex projects and to create innovative platforms, a kind of bank-as-a-service, explains Yves Reding. In the future, data will increasingly be at the heart of business, including outside the financial sector. The opportunities afforded by the IoT demonstrate it clearly. More and more data will be generated and will require adequate protection. In this regard, our strategy of positioning ourselves around a focus on sensitive data remains extremely relevant.”

Yves Reding, CEO, EBRC

‘‘With increasing digitalisation, companies have to rely on strong IT partners that integrate all the necessary skills.’‘

‘‘With this alliance, we will be able to expand our presence in France and upgrade our service offering by better integrating our services and skills.’‘

Becoming a European player

While overall there has been an acceleration in the digitalisation of the economy, the European market is specifically experiencing deep transformations. “You have to see the new regulatory measures, such as the GDPR, as an opportunity. The European Union remains the biggest market in the world in terms of the consumption of goods and services. This position should enable us to impose our requirements and our values to the digital giants that have been dominating the market so far. The implementation of a digital single market that is accelerated by these new regulations has to enable new players to gain a foothold. And we are here, especially through the development of our international presence, to better support them”, says Yves Reding.

Tailor-made

In this context, EBRC is confident that its differentiation strategy will pay off. ‘‘Global players may have considerable clout, with standardised offers, but they do not have the opportunity to respond to specific requests in a local manner. With them, there are no possibilities to negotiate for medium-sized businesses. This is our strength. We can take into account the particular needs of each customer to ensure a tailor-made service”, says Yves Reding.

EBRC will, in the future, increase its differentiation strategy to better meet the needs of companies keen on developing their digital business while ensuring better protection of their sensitive data, with Luxembourg as its basis, but not exclusively so. ‘‘Our business has grown to meet the needs of the financial hub, explains the CEO. Without the financial sector, we would not exist. And it is because of this expertise which Luxembourg has accumulated and consolidated over the years that we are in a good position to shape the finance and banking sectors of tomorrow. By relying on fully developed skills, we are also able to meet the challenges of exploiting data in other fields.”

Preserving Luxembourg’s capital

However, the CEO of EBRC does highlight the risk of seeing these skills leave the country. The opening in terms of professional secrecy and data confidentiality in the financial sector could have systemic consequences for the future of the digital sector. ‘‘Giving up professional secrecy as it is currently considered risks to undo the high-quality ICT ecosystem that we took 20 years to build. Abandoning the need for explicit agreement of the end customer as part of the push for IT outsourcing will inevitably generate a re-concentration of the financial ICT centres now present in Luxembourg to other places. And if the financial sector’s ICT leaves Luxembourg, there will no longer be sufficient substance and customers to maintain and develop the nascent FinTech, Big Data or Cybersecurity activities that will naturally follow and also move to these other ICT places.”

Complementary players

In this context, EBRC diversifies its scope and strengthens its position in the single European Digital Market, by acquiring a stake in Digora. ‘‘Their activity as a specialist in data management is complementary to our own. Furthermore, our new partner is present throughout the entire French territory, says Yves Reding. With this alliance, we will be able to expand our presence in France and upgrade our service offering by better integrating our services and skills, from infrastructure to the provision of bank-as-a-service and software-as-a-service solutions.” EBRC thus intends to compete with the industry giants by adopting a more customer-focused approach. The company will thus even better meet the needs of European businesses, both large accounts and smaller companies that wish to improve the protection of their data assets.