Just would like to tell you and share with you a certain number of convictions, of course, explain the agenda for today. First of all, I'm not sure we need to reiterate how important the digital world and new technologies are for our world of banking. You mentioned in your answer 50% interface. We understand that, of course, the client is very important. They change their habits. We can discuss about the pace, the magnitude of the transformation, but it changes the habit. Clearly, we are facing potentially new competitors. The digital technology can bring down barriers of entry, in particular, I think in the B2C business. Regulators, they are still in a learning curve. Let's face it. With, of course, certain elements regarding, for example, infrastructure and security, cyber risk, also they are entering into new world of regulation.
I think that we're all facing the world of data, for example, regulation, which is fundamentally new. The new technologies themselves, as you know, they are changing permanently. I must say, probably in terms of industrial usage, we are still at the beginning, but we will see that it is already a reality for certain businesses and certain experiences. The war for talent, may I say, it's a crucial element. When I say this, the talents of tomorrow might not be the talents we were fighting for of the past. Of course, new risks, in particular, the cyber risk, which has become probably, maybe today, one of the biggest worries of investors. What I'd like to tell you is, in this world where so much is changing, I have really a conviction that in order to succeed, there are some key elements.
We need to be customer-focused, driven by data. We need to have definitely the technological infrastructure, which will enable us to embark in the transformation and keep, I would say, an entrepreneurial mindset. You will see this morning some example of initiatives with this key dimension, which is that you need to be able to experiment, you need to be able to fail and effectively accept failure. It's not easy in, I would say, traditional companies. I'd like to tell you also and share with you one, and I'm a little bit simplistic, but key element in my mind in terms of to what extent these technologies will impact the B2C on one hand, and the B2B or B2B2C space on the other. Regarding the wholesale activities, it's very clear, and you will see examples.
We have Franck Drouet, Head of our Capital Markets activities, Alain Fisher, who is in charge of developing the digital world within our wholesale activities, which will show you in practice how we develop new tools, how we interact with our clients precisely with digital technology, which shows that these businesses will also change. At the same time, when I think about the core relationship between a bank and a client, I believe that despite these changes, the relationship will remain also handled by a banker. I do not believe that given the complexity of this relationship, the diversity, the complexity again, of this relationship with a corporate or a large investor, you will easily just deal with digital technologies, at least in the foreseeable future. Regarding retail clients, on the other hand, we have here different models in mind.
You will have also a presentation by Philippe Heim, Bruno Delas, on how we see the transformation of our French retail network. You will have also examples of what we do outside France, with Didier Hauguel, and some demonstrations of initiatives. Here, depending on the clients, at least for the next 10 years, you will have certain models which will combine presence on the ground and digital channels, but also models where, such as Boursorama, the client is very happy to deal with a bank with no presence on the ground, with no identified banker as an interface. I think personally, the disruption in the B2C going forward will be more important fundamentally because overall, the relationship is a little bit less complex.
In essence, when you talk about millions of clients, it's typically the world of mobile, which allow to market in a personalized way at a very cheap cost. When you talk about the world of corporates, you talk about 1,000, 2,000 core strategic large corporates, 100,000 maybe SMEs. The granularity of this client base is lower. Let me now just explain how we try to think about transforming. You will see that these elements will be present in all our presentations today. First, this idea of being open. Open, what does that mean? First of all, we need to be open and modular in our IT architecture. It's absolutely crucial. We will enter into detail to explain to you how we think this new architecture, both on the retail banking side and the wholesale banking side. You will see, we make a comparison with Lego.
The idea is to have a kind of Lego architecture in IT, putting elementary pieces of Lego together with this world of API, as you will see. I think it's important to have that in mind. Second, very importantly, open innovation. Open innovation, what does that mean? That means being, of course, able to interact with this world of startups, open innovation. Claire Calmejane, who has joined us four months ago to run our innovation overall and transversal initiatives, will explain to you how we interact. One thing which is also very important is this concept of open source. Open source, that means that instead of just dealing with external providers that you pay, you are able to access a world of people, developers, who think that actually their contribution to the world is to provide for free their skills, their expertise.
Who are able to size, if I may take your apps, your APIs, enrich them, improve them, give it back to you. It's a world also where you can start to think. I will leave again the specialist about this to talk to you about this, able to compete with the traditional database providers and have also a capacity to work with people which provide infrastructure, this kind of elements for free. Of course, perhaps even more importantly, open banking. The idea is to say, instead of thinking in terms of a silo of banking services, the idea is to say, how can I build a service platform offering, which is, again, as open as possible, as able as possible to partner with other companies?
That means, in particular, in order to do that, beyond the capacity to be, of course, competitive in terms of price and quality of service, a certain IT infrastructure. That's why I think it's so important to spend some time on that and understand where we want to go. The second element is agility. Agility, it can mean a lot. Can I start with IT development? Here, again, I will ask you in the room to raise your hands. It's the fourth question, I'm sorry about this. Just who has, among you, spent just time to understand what agile development means in the IT world? Can I ask who has done that? One. Yes, my guys, of course. I hope. You don't count. Can I just elaborate? It's a fundamental revolution of IT development.
I will take two or three minutes more than I was supposed to, it's a fundamental thing. It's our factories, the IT systems. In the past or so far, the idea was to launch big projects, three-year projects, EUR 50 million budget, et cetera. I think fundamentally, the more I think about it, no one actually, when you do that, has a clue of how long it will last and how much it will cost. There are many failures, and I guess you have experienced yourself some failures everywhere, not just in banking.
It's a process of building, manufacturing IT system, which is very sequential with many people translating step by step from the business people who have sometimes actually just a vague idea of what they wish to the end of the chain, the developers, who are the ones who are able to code in the machine these expressions of needs of functionality. You have different people in the value chain, and actually, it's like the film "Lost in Translation." The ability to do that effectively without actually changing or not understanding what it means is detrimental.
You have people who are developing sequentially, translating, then six months later, you receive a first lot of functionalities the business people and function people, "Oh my goodness, it's not at all what I wanted." The beauty of agile development is that you put together in the same room people from the business and people from the IT, you develop with very short cycles on a daily basis or maybe on a two-week basis, which means that if you are developing something which does not correspond actually to the need of the business, of the function, you can correct immediately. The risk of going in a bad direction is just limited to less than one day, you can amend immediately, you see immediately the result. The people, the business, and function see immediately the result.
I really believe that this new methodology of development is a revolution to be much more effective beyond the amount of money you want to spend on IT overall in what you are developing. It's a revolution because effectively, on top of that, instead of having two worlds who are different worlds, the business and functions on one hand and the IT guys, there is a need and a benefit to put these two worlds together. Can I just say that Agile, of course, beyond what we do in IT, goes beyond, of course, with the need to rethink the whole organization, having much more transversal organization than hierarchical organization, and that goes to the work and the way to organize the work. Third, the focus.
The focus is to say, when you think about this world of technology, et cetera, we could spend billions of EUR and maybe deliver nothing. We try in Société Générale, and I hope you will feel that when you will see the presentation during this morning. We try effectively to develop things with a clear business requirements. We try to ensure that when we launch something, an experiment, there is effectively business people who are involved, engaged, and of course, the IT resources which will correspond to the capacity to develop. I think it's important, and my own conviction has always been that this world of innovation has to start from the client, has to start from the client experience and potentially identifying where there are pain points, where there is a capacity to improve very much the client experience.
The bulk of the resources, the bulk of the initiatives have to be close to the ground. A little bit in line with what I said, of course, you have also then to have an IT infrastructure, IT people who are close to the business. That does not mean that this series of initiatives should not be, of course, coordinated, organized, neutralized as much as possible to avoid duplication. That's where you will see, again, people like Christophe Leblanc, who is in charge of our transversal resources, as well as Claire, who will explain to you how we precisely organize this transversality and have effectively a common framework in particular regarding, of course, infrastructure and cloud, but not just that. Let me now just conclude this introduction by saying, really, and that was what we said during the presentation of our strategic plan.
In 10 years' time, I really would like to have a bank which is fundamentally fully digitalized, where all the processes front to back are digitalized, with effectively a capacity to take into account revolution in the way of doing business, in particular with data management. Data management for me is a key transformation, and of course, a very open banking platform and architecture. Can I just leave with you a few convictions? First of all, beyond a technology revolution, and it is an industrial revolution because I've just mentioned that again, our factories, the way to produce, equip, implement our factories are fundamentally changing. It's first and foremost a cultural revolution.
You have to have your staff embarking in a journey, understanding that if they want to think about the services going forward, the relationship, they have to have this knowledge, this understanding, and even more probably, some capacity to interact with the IT in a totally different way. Myself, as you know, I'm spending some time to code because I want to understand. It's fascinating. I would like to insist, it's fascinating to see that just in a few hours, in a few days, you can develop new functionalities in an app. You can enrich an API, which means developing, testing the product to ensure it works, and enter into production in such a short cycle. That requests the business people, the function people to have this knowledge and thinking totally different way on their added value going forward.
I really believe fundamentally this transformation is not a risk, it's more an opportunity for banks. It's an opportunity to deliver a better service to the clients. The traditional banking services at this stage are not the champions of the world in terms of Net Promoter Score, client satisfaction. I have really the conviction that the banks which will succeed in that fundamental transformation will make a very significant progress in their client satisfaction. Of course, in terms of cost efficiency, it will be also, in my mind, a key driver for cost efficiency. As I've said, IT development will be more efficient, and you will save a lot of cost in dealing with low added value still today, sometimes manual processes, which will be automated thanks to this digitalization. Last thing, I just would like to say, it will be a long journey.
You cannot transform a bank from where we stand like this to this just in a few quarters. You will see also that even if it's a long journey, there will be effectively progressive and regular tangible benefits in the way we do our business. Again, you will see that the reality is already there. Last thing, as I've said, it's up to you. Each of us should feel committed to that. I can tell you, as a CEO, I do it myself. It's very important. I tend to think to a certain extent, I have change of jobs. At least I've changed the time allocation I have. I spend, of course, much more time on these technology issues, which are becoming more and more important for our own strategy. That's what I wanted to say.
The program, if I can have it just on the slide. As I've said, we'll start with the French retail banking business. Philippe Aymerich, Deputy CEO in charge of these businesses. Bruno Delas, in charge of our service unit called i-Team, which is the dedicated IT teams to the French retail. Didier Hauguel will actually present briefly the panorama of what we are doing in our international retail banking and financial services. We will propose actually to you to go to the sixth floor and just have demos. If you are bored with the first session, you will see concrete examples. 10 minutes, I think, per initiative.
After, probably a break, again, Franck Drouet, Head of our Capital Markets and Alain Fisher, in charge of the digital transformation in our wholesale world, will present to you also very specifically how we deal with that. We will conclude with Christophe Leblanc and Claire Calmejane, where we provide a wrap-up on our, again, global strategy and transversal initiatives. Thank you very much for your attention, and I now leave the floor to you, Philippe.
The world only moves because you make it move. The future is you. Société Générale.
Good morning to all of you. With Bruno today, we are very pleased to be with you to give you another view of digital transformation within French retail. I have to tell you that, as Deputy CEO in charge of French retail, that I have, of course, two major goals. The 1st one, it's client satisfaction, and the 2nd one, it's growing profitability. To achieve these two goals, digital transformation, of course, it's one of the key lever. What we'll try to do is to answer three questions. The 1st one, it's why do we think we can be successful in digital transformation? The 2nd one is how we are doing it, especially from an IT standpoint, and Bruno will go into some details. The 3rd question, it's what are the results already of this digital transformation?
Very briefly, before answering these questions, I would like to summarize what is at stake. To make it short, to a certain extent, the answer could be digitalize or die, but without keeping in mind clients' reality in the transition period. Digitalize or die, because obviously, we know that the momentum is very strong. We are already in this digital new world. As Frédéric said, there are two major impacts. The 1st one, it's the impact on the behaviors of our clients. You know that when there is a new best usage in some industry, it becomes very quickly the new reference in the market, whatever is the industry. The 2nd impact is that we are facing new competitors, new entrants, GAFAs, fintechs, neobanks, retailers, telcos. They have not moved yet the market shares, but definitely they have an impact. The frontier between the industries are disappearing.
At the end of the day, with the same goal for everybody, access to data. We have also to keep in mind that the tempo, the level of digitalization of the economy is not the same, in every country, is not the same in every geographies. In the case of France or market, the digitalization of the economy is still uneven. I just want to give you some facts. 50% of the transactions are still made by cash in France. I also want to mention that we still have more branches in France versus the average of European countries. It's not only you because you know the predominant actors, the mutual banks are still promoting a broad physical approach. Regarding our individual clients, of course, many of them are already very comfortable with the digital experience, but for others, it's not obvious yet.
In the process we are doing, it's very important to make sure that we are not losing core client during this transition period. Before going into details, I would like also to remind you very briefly our set up in France. As you know, we have three banks, Société Générale itself
Crédit du Nord and Boursorama, we consider that it's a real strength. It's a real strength because it enables us to cover a large spectrum of clients' expectations with three different value propositions. The first one is Société Générale, a very powerful universal bank with strong franchise on corporates, private banking, mass affluent clients, and a unique capacity to deliver both the digital experience and relationship banking. We have Crédit du Nord, which is a premium bank focused on SMEs, professional, also mass affluent clients, with very strong regional roots and with a tradition of expertise and quality of service. Finally, we have, as mentioned by Frédéric, Boursorama, pure online banking, so of course, fully dedicated to digital clients. What is also important to mention is that these three banks are not acting on a standalone basis. We are sharing a lot.
We are sharing, of course, best marketing practices. We are sharing corporate functions. We are sharing real estate management. We are sharing IT infrastructure. We are sharing IT security, which is so critical for business. Even more importantly, Bruno will explain that to you, we are sharing many IT components. For example, just one, you know that in our apps, we have a function which is very important to the client. This is the aggregation of accounts and documents. This function has been developed by Boursorama with the acquisition of Fiduceo, and within the month after, has been deployed in the apps of Société Générale and in the apps of Crédit du Nord. Finally, just to finalize my point on that, we are also sharing operating platforms, for example, Franfinance for consumer credit, Transactis for payments.
Now, we'll go more into details, and I will start by Boursorama. Boursorama is, as I said, is a pure online bank. It's already at the digital target, by definition. Boursorama is best in class. It focuses on the best user experience at the best price in a very open architecture mindset. This being said, it is also a fully fledged bank with a complete offer to address all the client needs. It relies on a very efficient setup operating platform. Boursorama has less than 800 employees. Boursorama does deliver. We have reached 1.6 million of clients. We will reach the 2 million number of clients by the end of 2019, which means one year before what was planned during the investor day. Boursorama is acquiring clients who are real clients.
I mean, they are not only using the day-to-day banking functions of Boursorama, but they are also buying product and services, namely savings account, insurance, life insurance, consumer credit, mortgages. The last point I want to mention for Boursorama is that, and we are very proud of that, the level of satisfaction of the client is very high. The Net Promoter Score is above 40%. For Boursorama, the roadmap is very clear. Keep the momentum in terms of expanding and developing the client base and remain at the forefront of innovation. I will give you an example. Maybe you have seen that. We have signed a partnership with Google Home, which means that Boursorama is the first bank in France to offer an internet of things application to its customers. Now, digital transformation related to the two mature networks, Société Générale and Crédit du Nord.
I would say two strategic goals, two pillars regarding the operating model, two levers. The two strategic goals, they were mentioned by Frédéric and by myself at the very beginning, client satisfaction, because it is key for today and for the future. It is key to develop our client base and also to increase the client's equipment rate. Second strategic goal, of course, to improve our efficiency in order to execute operations, but also to address all the risk and compliance issues at a lower cost. Two strategic goals. Two pillars regarding our business model. The first one is to be an efficient producer for all standard operations. Bruno will show you real-life example of these automations. The second pillar is to offer high level of expertise for key projects of our clients, corporates, professional, individuals, with tailor-made solutions and advisory services. Finally, the two levers.
The first one is IT. The challenge here is to combine the strength, the robustness of our core banking system with the flexibilities of new technologies. The second lever is our staff, with many ongoing initiatives to upskill our teams, front office, back office, IT, because of course, there will be no digital transformation without them. Now I will leave the floor to Bruno, which is going to go more into details to explain to you what is going on from an IT standpoint and the choices we made. I will come back to share with you the results of this transformation.
Thank you, Philippe. Hello, everyone. As Philippe just mentioned, the client expectations are evolving very quickly. The client needs more and more a trusted bank, available 24/7, and accessible through multiple channels. To answer this client need, Philippe asked me a very simple question in 2015. The question is, how can we digitalize our information system? Maybe I need to switch. Okay. How can we digitalize our information system to answer these new client needs? He also asked me, could we be agile enough to deliver value regularly and in the long term? To answer this question, there are two main options. Option 1, build a new digital system from scratch, like the new age bank. Option 2, build around our strong existing system. Maybe this is a new question for Klaxoon, but let me try to answer this question.
For sure, option 1 is very attractive, but it seems to us too risky. This is why we have chosen option 2, not only because this is the more economical, but also because our core banking system is very robust and very rich. Definitely, we have chosen this option 2 because this is the best to deliver the best-in-class customer experience and to deliver with a minimum of risk. I am sure that the question that you have is, "Okay, but how does it work?" To answer this question, let me go more deeper within the core banking system and the information system of the French Retail. At the starting point, there is nothing. There is something, for sure.
At the starting point in 2015, the core banking system, in yellow, was mainly connected to the advisors in the branches and sometimes connected to the client, mostly to check their account. If I go deeper on the core banking system, you can see that we have a lot of offering products, roughly 400. We have also a lot of multiple data belonging to our 10 million clients. You also need to know that this core banking system is capable of processing millions of transactions per day. That was the starting point. The digital strategy that we put in place is composed of 4 steps. The first step is about the interaction between the client and the bank. During this transformation, we have created 2 things. We have enriched the mobile and the web application, delivering new services coming from the core banking and accessible through APIs.
We also put in place a new digital exchange hub. Thanks to this digital exchange hub, the client can upload some documents, the advisor can push some contracts. The client can sign this contract. The 2 channels are completely interoperable. The second type of transformation is about the data hub. We have started by creating, in blue, a data lake, which fuels with all the data coming from the core banking system, all the data coming from the client journey. We also complete the data lake with some external data. After that, we put in place a set of machine learning tools. Thanks to the data and the tools, our data scientists are able to maximize the marketing analyses. They are able to improve the security protection, and so on and so on. The third type of transformation is about the data process hub.
To create this digital process hub, we started by putting in place a business process management tools, we complete this business process management tool by some digital brick, like e-signing or uploading of documents, but we also use some artificial intelligence tools like facial recognition. Thanks to the digital bricks and the BPM, we can redesign all our processes in a front-to-back manner, using, for the client, a very good user experience because we switch with digital brick and the core banking through APIs. The last digital transformation is about the business platform hub. We connected new business platform hub to the core banking. For example, as Philippe mentioned, the first business platform that we connected was Fiduceo to aggregate all the data, in a single place coming from other bank or other provider.
It was our digital transformation in four steps, we also try to be very agile to complete this digital transformation by creating a new open banking platform. We are launching this platform at the end of this year. Thanks to this transformation, we are now capable to address the five major client expectations, which are client knowledge, client experience, new digital services, new ways to pay, and client autonomy. Let's start with the client knowledge. The client want to be known and recognized by the bank and the advisor. To answer this need, we are putting in place a lot of tools like number recognition, like voice recognition. We also have put in place a tool to share the same screen between the client and the advisor when they need some help.
The most important tool that we put in place is a real-time dashboard called 360 Client View. Thanks to this dashboard, we are capable to put in a single place all the interaction between the client and the bank in real time. I will let Philippe, in a few minutes, tell a little bit more about these tools. Client experience. The client want more and more a seamless experience. This is why we have created a digital roadmap for all our processes. As you can see, we are doing this digital roadmap not only for the private, but also for the professional and the corporate, and we are halfway there. New digital services. You know that the client want to access and manage in one single place all their accounts, all their bills, all their wealth assets.
To answer this question, we have shared the Fiduceo platform with Boursorama. Thanks to this platform, we are best in class for the personal finance management for the client. We also benefit from all this data to put in place new digital services. For example, we have launched recently a total new digital investment platform called Sinew. Thanks to Sinew, you can push advice to your clients to improve your asset portfolio regarding the client risk. Here is a short demo of Sinew.
I would like to introduce you to Sinew, our new digital advisory service that you can access on your computer, tablet, and mobile. Sinew is a simple and practical service that we have designed right here in-house, and under certain eligibility terms, lets you manage your financial investments for your life insurance policy in order not to miss out on any opportunities. How does it work? Whenever our economists and experts implement a new strategy or detect an investment opportunity, we'll create your own personalized advice that fits with your investor profile. You'll be automatically notified by text, notification, or email, and you'll find our advice in your own secure online customer area. With it, you'll find additional detailed information, including regulatory documents explaining our advice.
If you have any questions or would simply like more details about the advice you've received, our experts will be at your disposal to support you in the digital universe. Once you have all the information required, you can confirm your investment choices with just a click. Using the dashboard, you can access the latest information about your investment at any time, such as the investment amount, the distribution of assets, or even how your investments are performing. At Société Générale Private Banking in France, we are focused on giving you the perfect balance between digital service and human contact. Feel free to discuss this with your private banker.
I hope that you believe me when I say that we are better in IT than in translation. Next step, the new ways to pay. They really want to test new way to pay, but they want to do that securely. We know that we invest a lot in security. We continue to invest to stay at the forefront. If I give you just some example, we have launched two secured card. The first one, I'm sorry, it's very small. This is a biometric. No, this one is not the biometric. This one is a cryptodynamic card, and the code is changing every hour, and you can secure all your internet payments.
The second one is a biometric card, and with this card, you can recognize your fingerprint, and you have no code to tap. We also are in the starting block to launch the instant payment at the end of November, and we can launch all this new way of payment because we have put in place an artificial solution that allow the bank to detect all the fraudulent transfer in real time. This is this one on the left, on the right. The last expectation, not the least, is about client autonomy. You know that the client need a lot of autonomy. We have a famous app, and we enrich this famous app with a lot of new function in different topic. The better way than to explain it is to show you. Let me connect to my app and show you some of these new function.
I hope that the technique will be okay. Normally, my app will be on the screen. Ta-ta-tum. I've got a backup normally, but something matters. Okay, maybe it's my fault. I do it again. Okay. Let me launch Excuse me?
You get [Foreign language]dépanné.
It's all the accounts. It's my personal. I will show the demo very quickly. When you start, you have an indicator to know the amount on your own account. Of course, you can go down to see more about your account. We have put in place a Touch ID to recognize and to be sure that you are allowed to do that. I put my fingerprints. You can see all your account within Société Générale. Of course, you can now go to other bank and click on other bank. Boursorama for sure. Yes, you see Caisse d'Epargne. You can see all the account that you want to consolidate in one single place. You can also, for sure, add new bank. You can add every bank that you want. For example-
In France or all over Europe?
For the moment, only in France. Let's go back to the home page. On the home page, we can go on card. I have 1 single card, but you can put many. With this app, you can now do many things on your cards. You can change the monthly amount. You can change the capacity of withdrawal. You can also explain that you are going in a foreign country, and you want to be sure that your card is available during your stay. You can also cancel your card. All these functions are in real time. If you want to buy something on the website, you cannot. You go on your app, you move up your account, you can buy immediately after. Maybe just a little last one.
For sure, in insurance, you can now simulate and create a contract for your car, for example. You go on the app. You go further, you can do very easily the simulation. You choose your car. You put in place the following. You can also ask, if you are not able to go further, to be called back by an advisor. He does that, and it's very surprising, but he can do that very quickly. Maybe the last one, I don't know, because it was about. [Foreign language] For the last one, for example, you can see all the accounts and all the operations coming from all the accounts that you have in different banks. This is the personal finance management.
You could also see all your operations by category, and this is why this application is very famous and very useful. Maybe I will stop there. To sum up. To sum up, we are sure that we have the right digital transformation strategy. To prove it, I propose to lend the floor to Philippe to give the results on the ground.
Yes. We would like to show you a few of our facts to see that this transformation is really taking place. We will address 3 components of our business, client usage, marketing approach, and the consequences, the impacts of all of that on our front office and back office setup. Regarding client usage, I will do it briefly because Bruno has already told you a lot. You see some numbers. The clients using our app are growing very quickly, by 30% during the last 2 years. We have 94% of domestic transfers, which are already executed by the client directly through the app or the website. We have a similar trend on international transfers. You see that now it has increased from 30% to 67% of international transfers are performed directly by the client.
We have also a significant increase on all the self-care related to credit card. Finally, there is a jump on the electronic signature, because for many of the products now, we have up to 35% of eligible contracts which are signed by electronic signature. In a nutshell, the clients are taking advantage of the new digital functionalities presented by Bruno. Of course, we continue to develop, to add new services today in the website, in the app, but we have also in mind all what is going on on the Internet of Things world. Of course, we want to continue to be up to clients' expectations. Second impact, I will detail more on our marketing approach, because that's true that digitalization allows to optimize and personalize our marketing approach.
With, of course, a very responsible usage of data because we want to remain a trusted partner of our clients. We are very careful about that. I want to give you four illustrations. The first one, which was mentioned by Bruno, is our 360 vision of our interactions with the clients. We have this tool, which has been implemented last year, which capture every single transaction, interactions between the client and the bank. It could be a part of his digital journey. It could be a call to a branch. It could be a call to a call center. It could be a visit to a branch.
These informations are shared within the bank, which means that we are aware of the situation of a client, his project, his problems, and we can give him a quick answer without asking him again to explain what his problem is. This tool, implemented last year, has radically changed the way we are more proactive with our clients. Second example is that, of course, the digital tools allow us to detect client interest during his digital journey and to propose some support. I'm going to give you an example. If a client is on the website doing a simulation on consumer credit, for example, we can reach him. We have been very cautious with that because, of course, we did not want to be too intrusive, we have done it very progressively.
What we have seen is that the clients actually are very comfortable most of the time with this call because it helps them to finalize the process, to have additional advice, and to have, yes, an interaction with a human being. This task is most of the time done by our call centers. Example number three is that big data technologies allows us to promote the right offer at the right time, at the right moment to the client. It's not new for individual clients. We have done it for some years, but we are also doing that now with professionals. Could seem a little bit strange. We have seen that it works also quite well with professional.
For example, the last campaign of Crédit du Nord, proposing overdraft facilities to the clients with a scoring tool, of course, has worked very well because you can see that it was three times more effective than the previous one. It's not only on the individual segment, but also with professionals. The last example, it's from a marketing standpoint. I can take the example again of Crédit du Nord, which has developed a tool called the Blue Box, which is able to aggregate many data, many information about the clients. Not only the current value of the client, but also his potential, his behavior, his digital journey in our tools on the internet. With that, we are able to have a much more precise, effective segmentation.
With this new segmentation, we are not only able to have more precise marketing actions, but also that's part of the tools helping us to reconfigurate, to refocus, to specialize our front offices. That's a transition to the third impact, which is the impact of all these evolutions. More client autonomy, new marketing tools, and automatic processes front to back, the impact on our front office and back office setup. I will start with front office. We have seen that the clients are more digital, and they are doing much more things themselves. Simultaneously, we have continued to develop our ATM, which are no longer only delivering cash. They still do deliver cash, but the client can also do more things with the ATM machine, printing an IBAN, doing a transfer. All this combination has two impacts on our front office.
The first one, you are well aware of that, is that it reduces the workload on our branches. With this reduction of workload, we have done two things. The first thing, and you can see the numbers here, is that, yes, we have reduced the number of our branches, and we will continue to do that by approximately 100 per year. First impact. The second impact, probably on the long term, more important, is that we are increasing the added value provided by the relationship managers and the branches. We have done two things. We are specializing our relationship managers because the one size fits all doesn't work anymore. I mean, the clients, they want specific advice, and so a relationship manager is not able to provide the same level of advice for many different clients. We have specialized our relationship managers.
The second thing is that we have also worked a lot on the format of our branches, because the branch with a unique format covering all segments, it's no longer the target. We are doing a lot for the professionals. For example, in Société Générale, the goal is to have approximately 150 dedicated spaces, corner or branches, for the professionals. We are also creating 30 business centers dedicated to corporate clients. This is also one of the big impact of the digitalization, because without the tools we have mentioned, we would not have been able to do that at this pace. Impact on our back offices. Here, the most important impact, of course, is the automation, front to back automation of client journeys.
As you know, we have communicated on that on the Investor Day, our target is to close six of our 20 back offices. The target was by 2020. It is done, more or less, which means that we have done that with 18 months in advance. Simultaneously, we have also specialized these back offices, again, with the same idea to provide added value to the client and also to increase our internal efficiencies. Our back offices are specialized, whether on individuals or on corporates. We have also created specific expertise in some of them on very complex products, specific mortgages or successions. The last impact is the impact on our call centers. Two years ago, most of the task was taking care of the incoming calls. Now they are also more proactive, thanks to the digital tools we have mentioned.
For the most standard products, they are contributing up to 10% of the global sales. To conclude, before answering your questions, in a few words, we are totally focused on our execution plan to change the bank. We are on track. We are monitoring this very closely with many KPIs. 2020 is a key step for us. As Frédéric mentioned, we'll deliver a bank more flexible, more agile, but we know that it's not the end of the journey. This new platform we are creating is going to be also key for the future, at least on two topics. The first one is that we will be able to easily integrate upcoming challenges, such as Internet of Things world or virtual agents. The second thing we will also be able to integrate is the new open banking world.
With this platform, much more flexible, we are able to integrate new product and services provided by third parties to sell them to our clients, to increase our revenues and notably our fee-based revenues. Conversely, with this new platform, we are also able to provide some assets to partners which will integrate them in their own platforms. I have mentioned Franfinance, I have mentioned Transactis, Claire will also explain what we intend to do with Treezor, which is our last acquisition, which is very specialized on the Banking-as-a-Service platform, and more especially on the core banking as a service. This is one of our next frontier to develop the B2B2C business. That's why we wanted to share with you this morning, with Bruno. Now we will be very happy to answer your questions. There are already some questions.
Thank you. Jean-Pierre Lambert from KBW. I had a question about the trend towards intelligent banking. We're going to have more and more data growing exponentially. The analytics are getting more and more sophisticated, developing very rapidly. You spoke about Blue Box. How do you see the spread of AI in your analytics? Is it centralized? Is it decentralized by business units? How do you see the development in that frontier?
For us, it's very important to have use cases, we need to start from a business need. Yes, we have centralized capacity, and Christophe will mention that later. The development of all these new technologies, we want to have them very grounded in the business reality. It's a kind of mixed approach for the time being. Maybe it's going to change in the future. For example, now we have many use cases regarding compliance issues. It's not directly generating revenues, but it's very important because that's part of the cost of doing business. We see that for many topics, including KYC, including anti-money laundering, artificial intelligence is helping us to act at a different scale and much quicker.
Yes, it's a kind of joint approach, but it's very important, yes, to have a global approach because we want to share, as I mentioned, resources, we want to share capacity, simultaneously, we should continue to start with a business need and a business or support function.
Hi, it's Guillaume Tiberghien, Exane. The question relates to the presentation you made earlier. Obviously very interesting, I don't know yet whether it seems necessary to change like this to survive or whether you're ahead of the curve versus competition. It's not very clear to me. I guess my question would be, do you think your transformation will help cut your costs or accelerate your revenue growth?
I strongly believe that it's mandatory. Without doing that, we would be already in trouble. Just taking the example of front offices. Without this new approach of front-to-back processes, without this new approach of client journeys, we would not have been able to do this consolidation and to prepare for the next step, which are part of our ID trajectory. Regarding the impact of all of that, yes, there is definitely an impact on the cost, just to mention it, but also an impact on revenues. My last example, when I was saying that we will be able to integrate more products and services from outside partners in our platforms, it's definitely going to increase the intensity of the relationship with the clients, yes, to provide additional services, maybe in some cases for free, but most of the time to generate additional fees.
We think that in many topics we have mentioned here, we are, at least in France, ahead of the curve. For example, for the app, it's definitely the best in France, and even better than the app of the neobanks.
Jean-Francois Neuez from Goldman Sachs.
Sorry.
I just wanted to ask, in the demonstration that we saw, for example, there was the car insurance application. Just wanted to know, since that was introduced, what have you seen in terms of market share? Has it been efficient? Is it something which is bearing fruit, to take the examples that you yourself showed? My second question would be, can you reproduce this abroad, for example, say, in commercially at marginal cost, or every country is really a silo when it comes to your IT platform? I understand it's not really France, but I guess I'm sure you must have a view on that.
Thirdly, how can we explain that a bank like Boursorama, with close to 2 million clients, at least from the last data that we see, is not very profitable, whereas you see things which are quite similar in a sense, like, say, FinecoBank in Italy making very different returns. What's the catalyst for this to change? Disrupt of the market.
I start with the first question. In the case of insurance, it's too early to have real quantitative evidence. What we have seen, and that the numbers I have mentioned, that yes, clients do like the new functionalities added on the app. For some of them, they are using them very quickly. For others, it takes more time. At the end of the day, and because we are doing a lot of tests before, they do like them. Yes, it has some impact, it's step by step. Regarding the second question, yes, there have been different roadmaps, in France, abroad, but we are more and more coordinating them. Didier will tell you what is going on in international banking. Again, from an architecture standpoint, we have a centralized unit, which is monitored by Christophe. We are sharing all these kind of tools, the best experiences.
We do not have yet a global, centralized monitoring of all of that. Definitely, the best example probably is Africa, because in Africa, for example, there is definitely one single view. Basically, with the same roadmaps everywhere, which is leveraging core banking systems because they are strong, they are robust, they are efficient, and adding bricks. The last comment regarding Boursorama, for us, the priority as of today is to acquire clients. The second priority is to making sure that the clients are buying products of Boursorama and generating revenues. This is the case, and you know that for the time being, the commercial spending in Boursorama is important. If we adjust even slightly this commercial spending, which is taken upfront, Boursorama is profitable. We have absolutely no doubt of the key component in our business model of Boursorama for the future.
Because it's key for us. We do consider that the fact to be the market leader in France with 30% of market share, 30% of market share in acquisition, is absolutely key for the future. Again, Boursorama, with a slight adjustment of the marketing expenses, is profitable.
Olivier Panis from Moody's. I think one of your added value as a bank is trust.
Yeah.
Hopefully your customers trust you more with data than they trust Facebook, for example.
Absolutely.
Here, how do you develop your open banking with the guarantee that the data of the customers are kept safe by the bank? The second aspect is, do you think at this stage, there are a lot of regulatory barriers to the development of open banking for the same reasons?
Well, I will start by the second part of the question. I think we have enough room of maneuver to continue to develop the business. Regarding data secrecy or managing the data, step 1 is, of course, we are fully compliant with the regulation. It's a no-brainer. Step 2, we have internal security and compliance team, which are very careful about all of that. Third, we ask the consent of the clients. What is very important is when you ask the consent of a client, you have to explain, him or her, what is the added value. Once you explain the added value, the client is free, and he says yes or no.
What we can see that most of the time when we explain clearly that with this usage of data, we will be more precise, we will be more efficient, and that at the end of the day, it's good for him, it's fine. If it's not fine, we are fine.
Yes. Good morning. Jacques-Henri Golarczyk, Pleche Group. I wanted to come back on the demo because it's great. In the good old days, you could ask your advisor for an overdraft, now you can ask your phone. On the risk basis, how-
You can still ask for your relationship manager
I was wondering how the risk function was actually working in terms of authorization, at which point you get to a risk committee, just a little bit for you to get us into the kitchen secret of that. Thank you.
On the kitchen, of course, risk is involved from the beginning in this kind of project. It's fully embedded. We have governance with risk committees. We have governance with new products committees because it's not only risk, it's compliance, it's legal, it's IT security. There are many components. In the case of, I've mentioned for Crédit, which is very interesting, is that the credit scoring is embedded in the process, it's asked through an API process. In the process, at some point, you have an API requesting the credit score, according to the credit score, we will activate the proposal to the client or not. There is full consistency in this example between the credit process as usual and this new marketing approach.
Aurelia Faure, Santander. Could you give a quantification of your IT costs, within your total cost, and also the IT development cost as opposed to the IT maintenance cost? At present, we don't really have any detailed split on this topic.
If you could be patient, Christophe is going to provide you within an hour all this data. If you want more, we can interact after, but that's within Christophe's presentation. It's coming soon.
Good morning. Better. Stefan Stalman from Autonomous. I would like to come back to the Boursorama economics. It seems to me as if Boursorama so far has signed up a lot of clients, but in a way, the wrong clients in that they're not very productive yet. They don't have a lot of loans on average. They don't have a lot of deposits on average compared to normal average French clients. Maybe they're buying less insurance products, et cetera. How do you think that is going to evolve over time? Do you think you can lift these clients to average productivity metrics? Or is there a point when you start actually attracting fully productive clients from other networks, so the mature clients with big loan books and big portfolios of securities to manage, et cetera? When do you think that will happen?
When do you think you will take market share from these fully productive clients, let's say, from the mutual networks based on your technology advantage, if there's one?
First, it's important to mention that Boursorama has been profitable from the beginning, from its creation to 2015. We are in an investment phase. This is year number three, let's be clear with that. Actually, the clients of Boursorama are profitable, and we are managing very precisely, according to the year of acquisition, how the clients behave if they are subscribing new products. We see very similar numbers compared to the mature networks. The numbers of products, it's more limited. Bruno was mentioning that in Société Générale, we have 400 products. On Boursorama, we have only 40, but 40 with a very efficient operating platform behind. Again, as I said, the clients of Boursorama are not only doing payments or day-to-day banking. They are buying, as I said, insurance, savings account, all this kind of thing.
The last thing I wanted to mention, and come back, I forget. What was the last part of your question? Sorry.
When you start to see market share gains in these high-
No. What is key in the acquisition is that, by definition, Boursorama is acquiring clients who are autonomous. If a clients are not comfortable with the digital experience, they cannot be clients of Boursorama. By definition, these clients should be autonomous and comfortable with that. If you need an interaction with a human being, Boursorama is not the solution. Regarding the market share, as I told you, acquisition of core clients for Boursorama, it's one of our core priority, and we are one year ahead of schedule. Again, we communicated on the Investor Day, 2 million clients by 2020, and this number will be achieved by the end of next year.
Laurie Mayers from Moody's. In terms of your strategy, can you just comment on the extent to which you're, particularly for Société Générale and Crédit du Nord, focused on client retention versus client acquisition? Despite everything you're doing that you've taken us through, in what areas in particular are you more concerned about disruption from either big tech or other new entrants in the retail space?
Okay.
In the retail space.
Okay.
Actually, this will be the last question because we have to go.
We will have a final Q&A session if you have more questions.
Okay. The first thing, and maybe I've not mentioned it clearly enough, is that keep in mind that for Société Générale and Boursorama, and in case in Crédit du Nord it's even more, 50% of the revenues generated by corporates and professionals. We speak a lot about individuals, but the foundation of the revenues are also very important on the corporates and on professionals. We are not focusing more on retention than in acquisition. What we are doing is, for both banks, making sure that we are acquiring target core clients. For example, we have been, yes, more selective than other competitors for mortgages because, as you know, the interest rates for mortgages are very low. It's an important amount of money dedicated to this kind of acquisition. We want to make sure that we are doing this effort for core clients.
Level of disruptions, yes, I would say it's already done for the individuals, that it's coming very fast on the two of our markets. As long as retail banking is concerned, as Frédéric said, this is different on the pure investment banking. We are not considering that nothing will happen on professional. On professional it's already there also. We are very careful, and we want to make sure that we are ahead of the pack. Okay? Now I leave the floor to Didier, which is going to tell you the roadmap for international retail banking and financial services, and to introduce the four workshops we are going to have in some minutes. Maybe we can show the movie again? Okay.
Thank you, Philippe.
Hello, everyone. I am very happy to be with you this morning. I am going to be here on behalf of all my colleagues from International Banking and Financial Services businesses to talk about our digital transformation, I would rather say our digital transformations. As you know, we are very diverse. We are very diverse not only in terms of business models and location. In terms of maturity of digitalization, nevertheless, we have embraced the digital transition, and we have done it with three credos. First is convergence. Whatever the starting point, whatever the level of initial digitalization, all businesses in banking are meant to converge to the same model around digital. Not necessarily at the same pace, not necessarily along the same way, but all towards the same direction. Second credo, growth. Digital, it is a huge opportunity to develop our customer base. Third credo, decentralization.
Yes, of course, the investment has to be monitored. Yes, of course, we have to share expertise. Yes, of course, we have to replicate solution. In the same time, above all, it has to be decentralized, implemented in a very decentralized fashion to make sure that solutions are relevant to our local business models. You said this morning, this approach obviously tackles the customer interface. What matters to change the customer interface is what is going on in the kitchen, as you said earlier, because customer interface is only the tip of the iceberg. In fact, it proceeds from an in-depth revolution of our entire value chain. Let us take them briefly, step by step. Process digitalization, it is about streamlining end-to-end the processes. That is what we are doing, for instance, in Russia to build our SG Russia digital store.
This streamlining combines automatization, better controls, and a substantial reduction of the time to yes. You will have an illustration, a demo of Russia housing ecosystem. Second step, APIization of our information system. We have launched across the board in all our locations an extensive reorganization of the systems, and that is a prerequisite to operate in an open architecture. You will have an example of that with Moonshot. Moonshot is an internal startup, Moonshot has been developed by Societe Generale Assurances to be able, relying on an architecture that is 100% APIs, to be able to develop with partners some pocket insurance products. Third step, big data. It is about combining internal and external data to get 360 view of the client and then to process it through artificial intelligence mechanism.
Yes, it's a way to get more business. More surprisingly, it's something that our most advanced retail debt collection platform in Germany, in Russia use, it has a huge impact on the cost of risk because of more efficiency on collection and because of improved recovery rates. Fourth, new products. Digital is not only about making some existing product digital, it's about inventing product that would not have existed without digital. I think that you will have an illustration from that with what's going on within ALD. They have numerous outputs from corporate car sharing to online second leases for individuals. The next step is even new business models. A new business model is when you tackle a new segment of clients. You do that with a brand-new infrastructure.
That's what we've doing in Africa. In Africa with YUP, we are providing basic banking services out of partner shops, groceries, gas stations. You will have a demo about what YUP is about. Next element, the new ways of working, and Frédéric mentioned that earlier about agile. I think that it's about breaking the silos. It's about allocating our staff in the light tribes, i.e. multidisciplinary teams that are going to be focused on one very precise short-term project. We're going to get feedback from the clients. It's a great way to increase customer relevance and to obtain fast delivery of projects. The best example of that that we have is in the Czech Republic, where we have engaged agile at scale kind of transformation. Already 25% of the staff of the headquarters of Komerční Banka are organized and working in two tribes.
It's bearing quickly some fruits. I would like to have you go back with two takeaways from this introduction. First, the digital transformation, it has played within IBFS in a massive effort. It's not necessarily at the same pace, it's not necessarily the same mix of solution, because IBFS is diverse, but it's taking place everywhere. Just as a summary of that, the share of a change of bank within our IT cost in the last four years changed from 35%-43%. Second, the names of the game are growth and efficiency. This investment to change the bank focused on client satisfaction and our initiative to transform ourselves, they are paying off. In the last four years also, it allowed IBFS to steadily increase its customer base, +6%, and to sharply decrease its branch network, -11%.
Now let's go to concrete example with the demos downstairs. There will be four standing demos upstairs. As I said, housing ecosystem in Russia, Moonshot, for instance, ALD, and YUP. Thank you very much.
Good morning, everyone. In our division, we all think about digitalization every single day. We all talk about digitalization every single day. When faced with reality, how do we deliver? How do we deliver an incredible user experience, reduce our costs, become agile and innovative? How do we translate our promises into reality? Today, I am going to share a journey that started in 2014 with a unique objective, make our clients, staff, partners' life easier and more efficient at work. We are in 2014. We deliver a quality service, it is not scalable. Most of our interactions between clients and bankers are slow and manual. Our juniors, seniors prepare pieces of advice, reports, analytics, answers to RFPs, RFQs, RFS through a lot of manual tasks. Outlook, Excel, PowerPoint, Bloomberg Chat, Phone are our daily main tools.
Information flows from one person to another with the risk of being deformed and outdated. When this is done, we have another set of manual tasks through our controls, also the ones from our regulators. This is not what we have at home. We've got a mobile with a lot of apps, very efficient, we are autonomous, we love it. In 2014, we imagine the future of our interactions between clients and banker into an ecosystem represented by this virtuous circle. Everything is interconnected. The same intelligence is used between us and our clients. Ideas are fast to emerge and implement. We set and communicated a clear ambition. We want to be a single marketplace for all our B2B services within our division.
For all client segments, large corporates and all FI, for all our services, market services, financing services, security services, cash management services. In 2014, we already had all our research analytics developed with an API-first strategy. We were well-prepared technically and thought that building a platform would be a rather technical challenge. We quickly realized that the real complexity was not technology itself, how we apply it. We established three key principles that have been key to our success. The first one is stay focused. We are business-driven, not technology-driven. We have a lot of fantastic tools around us, they will not bring a digital transformation by their own. They have to be connected to the entire setup within the bank. This setup, we have to fix it, we have to transform it, we have to make it agile.
The second principle is the use case. We test and stress any idea before we write a line of code. The third principle is be patient. We know where we are going. We have the vision. We do it step by step. If we do everything at the same time, at the end of the day, we will do nothing. How did we do? We want to be in the race against GAFAs and startups in financial services. We have to act like them, also capitalize on two fantastic assets they do not have. The first one is our network of people with their specific expertise. The second one is our data, our processes, our intelligence. Let's call it our legacy. Unfortunately, this fantastic asset is trapped under thousands of monolithic applications. The legacy or gold, we have to transform it.
Traditional strategy would attempt to create new systems and replace the old one by new system. It's multi-year project, the cost is huge, and at the end of the day, you have another legacy system. Another traditional strategy is to converge system. You take piece one of system one, piece two of system two, et cetera, and you try to merge them. Multi-year project, huge cost, and at the end of the day, you have more a Frankenstein system than a digital system. How did we do? We chose, in fact, to capitalize on our existing analytics platform and make it grow step by step. This was the first part of the strategy. The second part is to break down our legacy into much more smaller tasks and transform it, deconstruct it, step by step. In a race, the overall winner is not always the fastest one.
Often, it's the competitor who is able to take the turns the best and continuously adapt to the condition of the course of the race. As you know, in a turn, there is first a slowdown, and after, a strong acceleration. Our challenges, our turns, are to make the best of our monolithic applications by moving but also improving them into our SG Markets platform. For each move into the platform, we take the time needed to align our legacy system with our core principles. Now, everyone need to understand what I'm going to say, even if it's a little bit technical, all our business people included. We first start to decorrelate the user interface. It has to be an excellent user interface, totally independent from all the business logic behind. The user interface is what the user see. It's the tip of the iceberg.
As you all know, for all iceberg, there is a strong invisible part. This invisible part is the business services. All business services will be done through APIs. This little piece of code can interact with one another, Frédéric compare them to Lego, that interact with one another and build a business service. When you build these APIs, you have to sync them all together. You know, the Lego, they all have same properties. The same for our APIs within our SG Markets platform. This part is totally decorrelated from the user interface. No intelligence in the user interface.
The third part is the data with all our legacy database that we will change progressively when we will have decorrelated everything in all our legacy between our user interface that we change every 3 to 5 years, then our APIs that we change continuously, let's say, in average, every 10 years, and the data that we change every 20 years. All these small pieces interact with one another, thanks to the fourth element, the core services, the SG Markets core services. This element is very important. It's the spin dorsal of our strategy. I'm going to zoom on it. The first part is the security part. It's going to be more and more important in our approach, very important for our businesses. I'm not going to describe all the capacities behind this pillar. I'm just going to say that everything is done by design.
It means when you enter the platform, you are fully secured by the platform itself. No tons of extract after through Excel, et cetera, to see what is not done in the right way on the platform. The second pillar is the user and developer experience. I would like to focus on three blocks that we are very proud of. The SG API catalog on SG Markets, you can see everything that has been developed. It's open. Anyone in the bank can use it, even clients can use it. You will see it after. Our design system, which has been rewarded by the Unicorn InVision, and our AI capacity, I will come into it afterwards. The third pillar is the data, with the data lake, and the fourth pillar is the infrastructure, an important one. We want a lot of scalability into our platform.
The more red the color is, the more mature the capacity is. We still have some work to do on all these capacities. They are core. The governance behind all these capabilities is very simple, and even if they are all totally decorrelated from one another, they are seen as a family. There is a strategic correlation between all of them at the end on this core layer. Now I'm going to switch to some demos. I was supposed to do it online, but it's quite difficult, so I've done some screen capture yesterday. We start by you. If you go on sgmarkets.com, you will see, in fact, the whole offer. What we have today on markets activity, financing, global transaction banking, securities. You can see it on your mobile, iPad, PC or Mac.
Our design system allows us to have everything available on all platforms, coding only one time. Now I'm going to tell you the story of Florence. Florence, she's a treasurer within a corporate. She connects. She knows that the system is very secured thanks to the 2-factor authentication, and she arrives on the platform. Florence, what she likes on the platform is that previously, she had nine different websites with nine different account passwords, with nine different user experience. Here, she has a board of services where she can go anywhere from the platform. This morning, she wants to see her position, cash position, so she runs Global Cash. On Global Cash, she has a highlight at the top, and she can see all her accounts in one way.
Here, she sees that she has some cash on US dollar, so she goes back through the interface on her wall of services, and then she goes on the foreign exchange product offer, and then she executes a transfer from dollars to euros. This is the journey of Florence on SG Markets, and she knows that it's going to improve quarter after quarter through the services we are going to deliver onto the platform. Again, with the same user experience everywhere and the reuse of components. Now you saw what is our strategy previously. You saw the offer on the Forex execution part. This, in fact, thanks to the reuse, thanks to the approach we've just shown, we have reduced massively our costs compared to the monolithic version we had created on Forex between 2009 and 2012.
What is important to have in mind is this is the first version we did was for our staff, for the communication between salespeople and traders. We did it for ourselves, and then we open it to corporates. The story is not finished here. Because we have decorrelated everywhere, everything, because we have a very powerful business architecture, we created a version for John, who is a treasurer within an SME. This version, you can see here, the interface, same design system, and we just build a front-end on top of all the existing components developed through the previous version. The cost was really small, and it took six months to deliver, and we are putting it in production just now. The story is not finished here, because as you know, we've got a correspondent banking business, and Kim works in a bank.
Kim use, in fact, PAY FX, so it's payfix.sgmarkets.com. Again, it's all the same elements that are used behind the interface. We all see the interface, but what is important is the fact that we decorate everything behind the interface. Again, everything is linked into the platform. Now, I'm going to take the example of Vladimir. Vladimir is an asset manager. When he connects on the platform, he has 10 different services. Same story as Florence. He likes to have everything through the same user experience, the same thing as you have through your iPhone or through Microsoft or through Google, with the same user experience everywhere. Vladimir, he likes the notification part because everything is notified on the top line of the screen everywhere in the platform. It was the same for Florence on Forex and Global Cash. Vladimir, he goes into analytics.
Vladimir is a fund manager on the fixed income side, and Vladimir, he wants to do some relative value things through our analytics. He go on the charting tool, and on the charting tool, he is going to launch the France versus Germany to see the correlation between French and German bonds. You can see here that there are some color codes. Salespeople, engineers can prepare workbooks that they are going to share directly in the platform. Remember my first slide, no more email. Intelligence is directly done through the platform. You can send links of workbooks to anyone within the bank or to all our clients. Vladimir launched France versus Germany. He has a very nice interface. He likes it. He see a lot of things between the correlation of bonds.
Now, at the end of the day, he says, "It's a little bit painful to go every day on the same website to see the correlation of the bonds." Vladimir, one of his colleague, Morgan, she's an asset manager also, but she code in Python, and she's a very good coder in Python. She's a fund manager. Vladimir is not a very good developer. He knows Excel, he knows VBA, but he doesn't know how to code. Morgan told Vladimir, "You should go into the API part of SG Markets, because, in fact, it's very simple, and you can even use them through Excel." Vladimir, he goes on the API part, and then, again, he's not an expert, so he's trying it, he explore it. Then he see, in fact, try it out, this API that get all the information on the product we use.
He sees a raw data. The API gives a raw data. No more duplication. He say, "Wow, it would be cool if I could have this raw data directly in my Excel. It would avoid me to go every day onto the website." He goes into the documentation, and he look in API doc, and on the API doc, we've got a VBA example, so under Excel. We've got also the code in R or in Python. It's some example to give to our clients. This is done through all our analytics. We have decorated the front end from all the business logic, and this is available for our clients. I'm going to show you the user experience from myself or anyone within Société Générale. Remember, our strategy is everything we do for our clients or for our staff is exactly the same.
I connect onto the platform, and what I like is that I can continue directly either under SG internal navigation or under client navigation. It's important to have this client navigation to see what is the offer given to clients today, because it improve week after week. You can see this little red triangle. It means it's internal only. It's only for SG staff at the moment. I continue onto internal navigation, and I see that on the markets offer, I've got the equity derivatives flow with this red triangle. We are, in fact, doing some automatic workflows between sales and traders, and for sure, in the future, one day, we'll be able to open this to clients immediately. I continue. I click on the board of services. This is my board of services. I have more than 120 service into this.
This is the one I use the most, and I'm going to launch the one called Intelligence Artificial. You see that it's a red triangle here. The system gives me the services that I use the most. I'm going to show you a quick demo on the market chat parser through machine learning techniques. One of our data scientist has created an API that will be used in all our market activities that is able to parse any chat request that we receive on any asset class. You can see here, this is a client request, and in fact, machine learning technique is going to parse this text and to transform it into structured information that will be passed to an API that will be used on all our execution tools.
What I like also is a developer portal where I can see, in fact, all the developments that are done within SG. We'll open some of it to our clients in the future. Our innovation, the sgmarkets.com service, that allow me to follow all the use case that we push within GBIS. Where do we stand? On the analytics part, it's one service. It's just an example of one service. We have multiplied by two our external user, 4,000 user. Out of these 4,000 users, 377 use the APIs directly. They do not use the interface directly. They use the APIs. They connect their intelligence to our intelligence with 30 million codes this year and with 60 GB of data downloaded per week. After, this is our indicators globally, the one that I follow.
The time to market has been divided by two when we developed on SG Markets. For some developments, it has been divided by three, four, and even five. The reuse of our design system has been multiplied by 100. In 2014, we have two different service. Now we've got more than 200. The scalability, the number of service available in the platform, it has multiplied by 15 in the past four years. The synergies, the services that our clients and us are using. Again, everything we do between client and staff is exactly the same. In the next two years, we will develop, we will transform and improve a lot of legacy system into this platform. I'm going to focus on three specific ones we are going to do. A more integrated client journey for large corporates.
There are still some services that are missing into the platform, and that will be very valuable for our corporate clients. Second one is the opening of our deal processing capabilities. We will have a dealprocessing.sgmarkets.com offer. Third one, our KYC. Last year, we have started all the remediation on kyc.sgmarkets.com. We test it internally. It's in production internally. All our remediations this year were done through this tool, and we will open it to clients at the end of next year. I leave the floor to Franck.
You keep it? Thank you, Alain. Good morning, everyone. I'm pleased to be with you today and to give you a few example of what we are achieving in term of a digital initiative in global market activity. First, I would say that technology is part of our DNA. If we have been able to build our derivatives franchise over the last 30 years, it's thanks to extensive usage of the computer. The exponential growth of the CPU has enabled us in the last three decades to provide to our client more and more sophisticated product, while at the same time managing more and more complex risk. It's true as well that, for the last decade, we have faced, like any other banks, the great challenge of incorporating into our information system new functionalities due to the changes of regulation.
Also because we realize that some parameters were neglected before the crisis, like the parameter link, for example, to the liquidity risk. All those functionalities, we have been forced to include them, incorporate them into our information system very quickly in order to comply with the regulation or to adapt our models. That's basically transform our information system is very complex. As Alain has mentioned earlier, the first task and the first challenge that we are facing is to simplify this information system by separating the three part. The first one, the screen or the interface, user, the client experience. Second is where, again, the value of our system is. It's all the pricing functions, all the risk management capabilities that we have, transforming them into APIs, and also reducing the number of database in order to have the cleanest data possible for reuse.
All this, we will put on the SG Markets platform, on our single platform for the wholesale banking activities. This require the strong cooperation between three actors. The first one is a business owner, the front officer, because he knows what the clients wants. He has a vision of what kind of service we want to deliver to the client. The second one is the digital designer. He knows what kind of APIs are available. He makes sure that all the development are rational, and that we are reusing all the APIs which has been developed. The third participant of this trio is the IT developer, of course, that has to develop the service in the due time. I think it's very important that these three people, these three actors, are working very strongly together.
It require as well, a same, common understanding of the technologies that are available to them. I think at Société Générale, we have, on the front office, a population which is able to understand the new technologies, and therefore, we are also making a strong effort in term of recruitment of young talent, having some technology experience. A few example of a few indicators of a SG Markets platform. You can see that the number of visitor has increased significantly over the last 4 years, more than the double. Maybe more importantly is the number of pricing request that is occurring on our platform, SG Markets. You can see on the structured product side, it has increased by 10 times over the last 4 years. Now it's 600,000 pricing requests which are done on the yearly basis.
We will see that it's saving a lot of time for us. Now I would like to give you two examples. The first one is on structured product. Obviously, it's one of our franchise, and it's on the pricing of one product which is becoming the most famous product in the distribution of structured product, which is the AutoCall. I think we talk about it in February. Here you have the screen of a standard AutoCall, that the client can directly input the underlying, what kind of maturity he's looking at. In fact, all the different parameters that is requested. At the end, he get the price of 2.95. We have also the function or the advisory function to provide him as well some ideas on the, if can potentially change the underlying, extend the maturity of the product in order to get a better yield.
That, I would say, is relatively common for all the banks having a franchise in structured product, especially on the distribution side. What is more unique is your capacity to provide on the system, on the platform, ad hoc pricing, matching the request of the client. There is first a discussion which takes place between the financial engineers and the client, describing what kind of payoff he wants to have, and the financial engineers is able to write a script in our internal financial programming language that we have developed 10 years ago. We are reusing the most valuable part of our system. He's able to write a script. He add up just a few lines in Python where the financial engineer will describe what kind of parameters the clients need to input in order to get the pricing.
When this script, in LVP, in our language programming, plus the one in Python are ready, the client can right away start to price on the platform. Obviously, this is an innovation that we have developed 12 months ago, which is very appreciated. More than 500 new product, new version, and you see Athena 4S is the AutoCall. You see that the people have tried to change little bit the payoff and they add the new ideas, the client, and more than 4,500 new payoff has been created on the platform in order to service our client. I think it's more than 150,000 pricing requests which has been made using this functionality. The second example I want to mention to you is on the commodity side, this time on the trading.
Here you have a discussion, a chat that is very common between a client and an investment bank. The difference is that the client here is discussing with a robot, a trading robot. This robot, we have been able to build it thanks to the usage of all the APIs that has been developed on our platform. One of them, as Alain has mentioned, was the parsing recognition of the language of the request of the client. As the robot is still a junior trader, it make sure that he has well understood what the client has request. It's, did you mean buying one lot of copper?
After, you have a regular discussion between the client and the sales or trader, and at stage 1, the client is giving an order to the robot, and the robot, when the price match the request of the client, is executing the transaction. Right away, the client will receive a confirmation from the robot with all the disclosure that MiFID II is requesting. As well, the robot will send the instruction to an information system for the settlement. I think what is important is that we are using Symphony for this robot. Symphony, it's a platform which is commonly used by investment bank and the buy side. We were able to develop it because Symphony is an open architecture. I think it's very important that for innovation, we have either open architecture or open source.
The advantage for the client is first, is using the same platform to chat with the sales, because the sales can be a part of the communication, obviously. He can execute also on this platform and receive the confirmation. It's not only for listed product, but the robot understand as well if it's an OTC request. As Symphony is available on tablet and smartphone, the client, if it's out of its office, can continue to chat and trade with the application and in the direct with the robot. This robot has been recognized as an innovation, and we receive a few articles in the press recently for this. Obviously, it started with commodities. We want to deploy it across the different asset classes, and we will do that. Again, it requires to have all the necessary APIs.
Therefore, we will have to continue to simplify and to transform all the functionalities that we have on other application, asset classes, in APIs. So, I think with these two examples, it is relatively short, but you can see that at the same time, we are able to improve the user experience. Also, we are refocusing our front officer, would it be the sales, the financial engineer, the trader, toward more value-added functions. Which is, for us, improving the algos, giving more content to the client, focusing on the content, or finding new innovation in terms of end product. Spending less time in the pure, basic execution or, like for the first example, spending a lot of time to give a lot of pricing tables to the client, because the client is able to do it himself.
Overall, and as a conclusion, I would say that the journey has started. We see more and more requests from our people at the front office, having plenty of ideas on the services that we can provide to the client. We should never underestimate the time that it will take, again, to simplify our system and to make sure that we have the good reuse of the APIs. I am very confident that we have the people, we have the talent, the experience, the willingness to embrace these new technologies. I am pretty sure that we will have more service to show you the next time. Okay. Thank you. Now, I think with Alain, we will take a few questions, and after, we will leave the floor to Christophe.
Thank you, gentlemen. Jacques-Henri Gaulard, Kepler Cheuvreux. The structured product demo you showed was really interesting. It seems to lend itself very well, the platform to that. How much do you think of the pricing or even the transaction of that could be done this way, going forward? How much is it now, and by when? It seemed like a natural development for it.
I would say, on the very standard AutoCall, there is 20%-25% of our transactions are made through the platform. We are using, and I think it is important to mention that obviously, we are building our own platform as a market, but client, and the client is also the retail banks, the private banks are developing their own platform. Therefore, I think in the future, what will be very important is to connect the different platforms between them. For this, I think, because we have a team which was in Fimat, after Newedge, we have been really involved in the connectivity between the client and exchanges, et cetera. We have this experience. I think it is roughly 20%-25% right now.
We have still some clients who are still expecting to have a better price if they take their phone, to have just a small improvement that will continue to happen until maybe they realize that it's the same price than what can be given by the robot.
Yes, Pierre Chedeville, CIC. I have one question regarding, I guess that you use some shared platforms, for instance, on FX or things like that, like 360T, for instance. What is interesting in this platform, which makes the prices much lower, actually, in terms of margin, you don't earn a lot of money with cash FX today due to the development of these shared platforms. On the other end, you get a lot of information from all the markets. For instance, before this type of platform, you only knew the transaction you made with the clients. Now, you know all the transaction made by all the participants of the market, thanks to this shared platform. My question is very simple. How do you use this enormous amount of data regarding activities of these clients given to you by this platform?
I guess that they make you pay a fee to get access with all this amount of data. For instance, you can see that one company is exporting a lot to Mexico recently, you can say, "There is maybe something to offer," et cetera. Have you structured some things regarding the usage of this big data, regarding shared platforms? Thank you.
Thank you. It's true that, we have more and more information about the transactions, which will be on the multi-dealer platform or with the regulation, with MiFID II, we are obliged to post all the information, all the transactions of the OTC that we have done. There is one caveat on this, is that the biggest transaction, you have more time to declare them. The one we are moving, and I think as well on some markets which are highly electronized, that like 70%-80% of the transaction are going through a multi-dealer platform. The biggest transaction, the one who are moving the market, they are not on the platform. It's still on the voice.
Oh, really?
Yeah. Because I think for confidentiality, because you think that if a big order is coming, for example, your client doing, I don't know, a big transaction in Mexico, most likely, you see that the big orders are traded on the screen, that will move the market and maybe the bank didn't have time to hedge itself. Again, the biggest transaction, and we have some time up till one month to declare the transactions, even with MiFID II. Yes, we are using the more and more the data, the transaction, and we are analyzing them, and it's again, we will give more content to the client with this analysis. For the moment, there is still some parts which are still undiscovered.
Yes, just one question about security services and transaction banking, which we haven't really talked about too much. From point of view of developing APIs yourself and user interfaces and things, how much of this is about collaborating with other banks, as compared to doing things on your own?
Today, if you look at the bank, we've got plenty of services that we can mix up very easily when they are in the platform. It's our strategy to put everything in the platform. Our platform is also open, which mean that, if we want to link it, you've seen it with Symphony, but if we want to link it with other services tomorrow, coming from cash management in some countries or on security services, it will be easy to do it. Today, it's not the top priority. Today, the top priority to transform everything we have, all our gold, into something very agile, and where we'd be able to mix different things within the bank very quickly.
Let's move now to the-
Okay.
Yeah.
Okay.
Thank you very much.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Thank you. Hello, everyone. I hope that you enjoy the presentation and the booth this morning. Well, okay, it's time now to wrap up and to step back a little bit because I am going to speak about the overall digital strategy of Société Générale. Digital strategy is about technology and innovation. I will start first to speak about technology, and then Claire Calmejane, our new Chief Innovation Officer, will obviously speak about innovation. Let me introduce myself before. I'm Christophe Leblanc. I'm the head of the resource and the digital transformation department in Société Générale. I speak on behalf of the IT Société Générale community here. What is the objective of my presentation today?
It is to evidence that the digital strategy that we have is helping Société Générale to Transform to Grow, which is our key motto for 2020, as mentioned by Frédéric Oudéa during the investor day last year. Yes, indeed. The digital transformation is first grounded. This morning, you saw all the businesses. All their strategy are completely linked, dependent on digital. It's grounded. The second thing is it is responsive. Last year, in front of you, we committed on certain, I would say, targets in terms of technology, and I am going to demonstrate that we are well on track to achieve those targets. Third thing, if you want to succeed in digital, you need to be obsessed with quality. What I mean there is that safety, IT security are key in our transformation. Also, the production stability is key. We need to be obsessed with quality.
Lastly, as I consider and we consider technology as an asset, as a key asset of the group, we need to also to be watchful, which means that we need to take care of it, be it on technology like servers, application, but also people. You will ask me now, where do we stand in terms of digital transformation? Last year, okay, Yes, okay, one thing that I want to say before I go there is that when I say grounded, it's not only for the business. Actually, the full firm of Société Générale is following a digital transformation. Risk, compliance, audit, finance have their own digital strategy. Recently, I attended a demonstration of a tool which is called Instant-KYC, and it enables, thanks to image recognition on IDs, to complete the file of the retail customer.
It's an important milestone for our regulators. We have with this tool, a capacity by month to remedy 75,000 files per month. It's huge. It's huge productivity gain as well. In audit, the audit techniques have completely changed thanks to technology. You see, it's grounded in the full company. Where do we stand in terms of targets on the digital transformation? Recently, you saw maybe that we won the eCAC40 award. This is great. I'm very proud of this for the team. What is important for me is the consistency of our ranking, which shows that our digital transformation is on the long run as well. It is really a long effort. It is based on three key enablers, data and artificial intelligence, open platform, and cloud. Why do we choose these enablers?
Data is a key asset of the group. It enables you to create new services. It enables you as well to improve the customer journey. Open platform is about APIs, is about also creation of new services, and also about efficiency for our developers. Lastly, cloud is a foundation. Cloud is about scalability, is about resiliency, and also it's developer-friendly, and it's cheaper as well. Where do we stand exactly? On data, we have two main data lakes. On these data lakes, we are building, I would say, our use cases. Last year, we were roughly at 50 use cases in production. Today, we are, I would say, more than 80 use cases in production. We have a target. We have roughly in the pipe 246 potential use cases to be put in production.
We are well on our target to reach these 200 numbers by 2020. We are able to multiply, I would say, the use cases. On top of that, what is key and important focus for me is to make sure that we have the right data quality in our data lakes, and at the same time that we extend the perimeter of these data lakes. This is what we are currently doing. One hot topic for the banks is obviously artificial intelligence. There, there is 3 type of things that we are doing. Predictive analysis. You heard this morning Philippe speaking about Crédit du Nord Blue Box, tool, which is based on machine learning, on data, which is either internal or external data, which helps the commercial effort of Crédit du Nord. We can do also things around operational efficiency.
Recently, I had a demonstration of a tool in compliance, which enabled to screen all the article in the press on one client. Thanks to that, we are able, obviously, to see if there is any negative news, and therefore, achieve one important regulatory constraint that we have on our client basis. We are working as well on virtualization. You remember that Philippe mentioned the partnership that we have with Google Home, that we are going to implement soon as well in the French retail as a SOBOT tool, which is a sort of chatbot for our younger client in order to interact and do simple transactions. You see, we are well on track on data and artificial intelligence. If I move to open platform, Alain and Bruno this morning mentioned the importance of the APIs.
The fact that the APIs are enabling you to modularize your legacy system, this is key. My goal here is to make sure that we are sharing all the APIs. This is why we are implementing, and we have implemented, and we are deploying a catalog of API within Société Générale. A catalog of API is not an Excel spreadsheet with a list of API. It is about norms, standardization. The APIs which are exposed in this catalog have to fulfill certain norms in terms of security and monitoring. Today, we are roughly exposing 1,500 APIs in this catalog. Lastly, on cloud. Cloud, again, is a foundation. We have a hybrid cloud strategy. We want to move 80% of our infrastructure to cloud by 2020. We are well on track. We are at 60%.
We have the partnership with big cloud providers in order to do also public cloud. The share of the public cloud by 2020 should be around 20%. With all this effort that we are putting on infrastructure, we are able to save, and we will save by 2020, EUR 100 million per year. We are well on track. I must say, you will ask me certainly, how do we compare to other? We did a study with Gartner. They tell us that on the cloud, the fact that you have this strategy, this hybrid cloud strategy, is certainly a differentiating factor compared to your competitor.
I believe as well that the fact that we have this catalog of APIs, which is a common, I would say, asset for all the developers of the group, is certainly as well a differentiating factor. Digital transformation is well on track in Société Générale. It's no use to do digital transformation if you are not working in a safe environment. Safety is key. What does it mean exactly, safe? First, for me, it means that the IT production is stable. Second, that we fight, obviously, against cybercrime. Lastly, that we embrace an holistic view of the IT risk. On the production side, in Société Générale, in one month, we process roughly 60 million of connectivity in the French retail network on our e-banking. One day in January 2018, we had to cope with 128 million of order.
You can imagine, with this size of volumes, that incident may occur. We have to follow them, we have to solve them, obviously. What is key for me is to recover, and the time we take to recover from this incident. I can tell you that now we are able to recover 50% of our incident in less than two hours. This is a huge achievement. There we can be also innovative. We have implemented recently a predictive maintenance tool, which enables to predict, thanks to the analysis of the logs of the engines, incidents. In October, we were able to detect six potential incidents on the Swiss platform and the French retail e-banking platforms. Last year, we said we are going to invest a lot in cybersecurity, EUR 650 million over three years.
We are well on track on this investment, on this effort. This is a long-term effort. There, again, the capacity to recover is key. This is why the teams are training themselves in terms of simulation. If part of the system were down, if our PC were down, if our active directories were down, how do we react? This is really what we are pushing in our IT teams, to make sure that we have this capacity of reaction if we were attacked by an hacker. Lastly, I must say that IT risk is not only about only cybercrime. IT risk can be also project risk. If there is a bug in something that we are implementing, your production can fall. It's also about obsolescence. This is why you have to really have an holistic view of your IT risk.
This is what we are pushing with all the CIOs of Société Générale, and we have a sort of dashboard of IT risk management that we follow closely. You see, we are all obsessed with quality. I must say that my conviction is that technology is an asset, and there we have to be watchful. We invest in the technology each year, roughly EUR 4 billion. It's roughly 23% of our operating expense. Out of this EUR 4 billion, I must say that EUR 1.8 billion is on what we call change the bank investment, new investment, new projects. What is important is that with the other CIOs that we follow, obviously, the efficiency of this expense, that this EUR 4 billion are well spent. Let me illustrate this point.
Recently, we implement some key efficiency indicators, and I can tell you that in the IT world of the retail banking, we have been able to increase by 40% the number of release compared to last year. In the wholesale side, more than 50% of our application are able to release in less than four weeks, speed also matters. Obviously, we are also making sure that the run the bank of the IT is well under control. Lastly, I must say that technology is not only about, obviously, investment. It's about people. Today, in the IT filière of Société Générale, there are roughly 25,000 people. Because we are putting a lot of efforts in terms of contacts with the schools, the universities, organization of events, we are able to attract developers. Each year in France, we are recruiting 500 developers per year.
In India, we have a setup which is huge now. We have roughly 4,000 IT people in India, and this is obviously a key area of sourcing of talent for us. Attractivity for the people means as well that we are able to retain the people. This is why we are pushing for agility. Remember last year, we said to you we are going to have this target of 50% of our teams in the IT world should work around agile mode. Today, we are at 27%. We are experimenting as well agile at scale type of techniques, where the organization of the IT is really in sync with the organization of the business. Attractivity for the developers goes also with open source. It was mentioned by Frédéric. Our motto is open source first, and we are doing open source in database, in middleware, as well as in application.
The cloud is also developer friendly. We are investing a lot in training as well. You know, and we know, that a large part of the jobs in the IT are going to change. We are going to have new type of jobs, like Scrum Master, UX designer, and we need to prepare this population to these new jobs. We are spending a lot of time, okay, in terms of organizing academies and also automated self-services type of training journeys. You see, we are transforming the IT world today. One key takeaway that I would like to remind of my introduction is, my presentation is, that the digital transformation is well on track, obviously, in Société Générale, that it's key, it is embedded in the business strategy.
That we have differentiating factors, I think the key differentiating factors that we push are around agility, cloud, and open platform APIs. Lastly, you understand that really digital transformation is a key enabler of the Transform to Grow strategy, the second key enabler is obviously innovation. For that subject, I will let the floor to Claire. Claire?
Thank you, Christophe. Thanks, everyone. I would like to build a bit on what Christophe just mentioned about legacy. I'm the newbie in the team here, obviously. There is a tradition when you join a rugby team, you know that Société Générale is quite big on rugby. You're given a jersey, basically, your job is to build the value on the jersey, is to make this team stronger, is to create some synergy, that's the way I see my job as a business enabler of this transformation. Christophe has just covered the grow part of the plan. I'm going to cover how Société Générale is becoming more open and connected by putting customers and colleagues at the center of our transformation. We are one year into our Transform to Grow plan, a lot happened already.
My job is to structure and accelerate it even further. Innovation and business transformation is something I've specialized on for the last 15 years. I'm going to cover, in the next 15 minutes, how we are bringing outside-in perspective to change the way we work and to create some organizational agility, how we are preparing for the future. Because even if there is a lot happening already, we have seen that this morning, there is more to come, we need to understand these new capabilities and build them within Société Générale to keep the cost of the transformation low. I'm going to talk to you about how we are partnering and preparing for our open banking, open platform strategy, and how do we tackle the partnership with the fintechs and the technology giants. Last, I will cover how do we create new businesses.
You've seen some of the kiosks this morning with Hip, with Moonshot. I'm going to talk to you about our plan about that. I was mentioning about how we want to create some organizational agility. This morning, Frédéric talked about our cultural transformation. We're reimagining the way we work, and to do that, we are doing it in twofold. On one end, we are leveraging the data and we are building on our entrepreneurial culture, which are two of our key assets, historic assets we have in Société Générale. In the other one, we are getting inspiration from the startups and the technology giants to change and evolve our new ways of working. It's important for us in this journey to be inclusive and to focus on impact. Let me give you a few examples about what we are doing.
First, we are working on our culture and skills, and Christophe gave some example about IT, but we are doing that at the size of our organization, at the size of our 140,000 colleagues across 61 countries. We are running digital training programs, and we have more than 10 curriculums that exist in the groups. I've give you some figures about numbers of our training, which are very specific to two of them. We are running innovation and technology weeks in more than 10 of our countries, and they are not just for our IT staff, but they are for all colleagues of the organization. There was actually one 10 days ago in the U.K., where there was not only colleagues from all areas of our businesses, but also clients and startups coming together and sharing how our industry is evolving.
We're also transforming our workplace to stay efficient. We have a cloud-based environment, and more than 50% of our colleagues are already using it. This environment is not just your laptop and how you can connect, but it's also the usage, for example, of virtual assistants that enable us to be scheduling meeting much more efficiently. We've had 19,000 people that are bringing their own device at work. Again, this results in cost efficiency for the organization, but also a better workplace environment. We all know that. 15,000 people are enrolled in our home office program, which is not only a sign of agility in our organization, but also of innovation. I was mentioning we are getting inspiration about how the startups and technology giants are working. We've launched one year ago, at the beginning of the year, one of the largest intrapreneurship program in the world.
We engage about 15,000 of our colleagues to push some ideas that became 60 startups. These startups, we have put them in our network of accelerators across the world to test and learn from new techniques that are coming from the startup world, such as human-centered design, Lean Startup, Business Model Canvas. They are currently running through the acceleration. Some of them are coming at months plus six. We are already getting some learnings that we are integrating in our organization. More importantly, that what I will talk about in a minute, which is a creation of internal ventures, of new services and new products, what we have learned is to not fear to overcome our fear of failure.
To say that it's okay that we are working on this investment. About 30%-40% will become projects, new projects, new ventures, new products. Maybe about 10% of them will be capitalized and will be the Moonshot of tomorrow. Actually what we learned through this program as well is, what is the burden of our organization? What are currently the processes, the capabilities we need to change and to evolve in order to gain agility, to reach speed, and to be even more efficient and faster than we are today? Last, we are looking at the outside. We created a network of ecosystem builders that are leveraging six outposts, so six different innovation labs across the world, in Europe, in Asia, in the U.S., and in Africa.
They are continuously not only building partnerships, watching their ecosystem, which is very relevant for our business synergies, but also bringing us some insight about the pace of change and what we can observe so we can be reactive as an organization. We are becoming faster and more efficient. Like rugby teams, as competition progresses, we have to progress, and that is the way we see it. I was mentioning that we are also preparing for the world of tomorrow. I've talked to you about what we are doing in the entrepreneurship program. We've tested and learning some of the human-centered design techniques. These are frameworks that rather than using your processes and analyzing them in bits, basically, you start from a human perspective about everything you do. Using them enable us to put colleagues and customers at the center of everything we do.
What are we talking about? The skills and the capabilities. You may have heard of them. Service design, system thinking, customer research labs. Does it ring a bell? What is it enabling us to do concretely for the organization? It enable us to look at how our processes are working and where are the friction and the pain points of our customers, and Frédéric was talking about that this morning, and to allocate investments where they are, which is one of the key successes of the startups and technology giants as we have seen them. It enable us to connect better with our customers. Last point, it enable us to blueprint new value chains. We've talked a little bit about that with Didier this morning. What do I mean?
Yesterday, when you were buying your house, you were probably going to a branch, talking to a person. Eventually we finish with a mortgage advisor. They will provide you the way to buy your house. Today, you're probably going online, maybe taking a picture or going in Zoopla in the U.K. Eventually, at one point, you enter in contact with somebody in the financial service chain that provides you your mortgage. At the same time we are doing that today, there is Google technology that can almost predict with AI which house you are going to buy even before you know it. This understanding is very important. How do we buy tomorrow financial services as human? What are the points of contact? This will enable us to really understand what are the future value chains and how we remain present in them.
Let me build on that because it's completely integrated in our open innovation strategy, open banking, and open platforms to one. We want to be where our clients spend their digital lives. We appreciate they don't only use our digital platform, but they also spend their time in Google, in WhatsApp, and maybe in a lot of other digital tools that are provided by different companies. We want to be present where they are, and it's very important for us. We've talked a little bit this morning about open banking and the API economy. It's still very nascent. What we observe is that in the B2C segment, there is probably a journey to go. In the B2B, we can see some revenues that are already coming.
In the B2B2C, I will talk about that in a second with Treezor, but we can see that there is some revenues as well on this side. The way to think about it maybe is like the mobile that was introduced in 2007. Not so far ago, but look at the journey we've been on. That's why for us, it's very important to develop an ecosystem and strategic partnership across the group. Obviously, it's declined locally by each of our businesses because they will better understand what is relevant for them. We want to leverage the effort of the group to be present in this ecosystem so they can understand the power of our distribution network. The way that we do that is with a very specific and differentiated strategy in five pillars.
The first one is around incubators and accelerators, where we want to detect early where is the talent and the product. Let me give you an example. I don't know if you followed, but we've recently announced a partnership with a company called Duco, which is a London-based data management firm, which is enabling us to do reconciliation much more faster than what we had before with spreadsheets and legacy systems. This company was detected through one of the early connection in one of our accelerators. We also have strong commercial partnership at large scale. You visited ALD a bit earlier, the stand with John and the team. They've recently signed a partnership with an American startup called Vinli. Vinli used to provide consumer directly the ability to connect their vehicle in the cloud and to access different mobile apps with it.
Vinli is now providing kind of the app store for ALD to push mobility apps and mobility services for all the different business of ALD. That's one of the strong commercial partnership about how do we go even further than where we are? How do we accelerate? As you can see, we have several of them. We're also making some strategic partnership with the technology giants. We've been talking this morning about Google Home in our Boursorama brand. We've been talking about our cloud providers, and we obviously use Apple Pay as well. Last, the part of how do we create new business? How do we accelerate the disruptive scenarios and the high-growth strategy? For that, we've made some investment, and you've been all in the kiosk of YUP this morning, which was with the TagP ay.
We made an investment in this technology at the beginning, at the same time that they were developing YUP. There was a synergy between the business ambition to create something new and the capability of our group to invest in this technology and to better understand how it was evolving. We are also making some full acquisition. Philippe has talked about Fiduceo, which provide, and Bruno as well, which provides aggregation capabilities across our brands, in the French retail banks. We also made Lumo this year. Lumo is one of the pioneer in France about crowdfunding in renewable energy, and it's directly hosted by the business that looks at that in Société Générale. Last but not least, we've been referring to it a couple of times, I'm going to talk to you about Treezor.
Treezor is a very interesting acquisition. It's still under approval by the French regulator. Treezor is the leader in France to provide the core banking system for the fintechs. It provides API payment services, KYC, and personal accounts, like you can see with the neobanks that send you a card in a couple of days to your home. The reason we made this acquisition was for us twofold. First, it's an opportunity to accelerate our open banking strategy in the retail sector. We've talked about that this morning. Second, it's an opportunity to distribute some Société Générale products in the ecosystem of these fintechs.
For Treezor, it was an opportunity to have a main partner that is able to help them, in a very competitive market, to upskill their technology products, but also to develop internationally, something that we have because we have a presence and a network across several countries where they want to expand. The reason why Treezor was interested to work with Société Générale is because of our entrepreneurial culture and because of our direct access to senior management. I am just going to play a short video so you can see what it looks like.
Payment is at the heart of digital transformation in business. Treezor delivers a solution to the challenges of payment digitalization as uses diversify and multiply. Our open banking platform provides innovative banking services made to measure for businesses. Give your clients new, safe, mobile, real-time payment solutions. Treezor: Reinvent the way you pay.
What I want to stress is when we work our open innovation strategy, it's totally grounded into our open banking one and our open platform one. For us, it's a real ambition at the group level to go towards that direction, and it's very important to find the right partners to build this future. Last, how do we create new businesses? That's something that we have been working a lot over the last 18 months. You've seen YUP in the kiosk. You've seen Moonshot as well. We have two other internal ventures that have set themselves up. One is Peers, which is basically an investment network where you can get some tips about how to best make your investment. The other one is Elyxir, sorry.
Elyxir, which is a digital finance advisor, which is basically introducing a new relationship between clients and their savings. That's something that you could have seen in the market, but the specificity there is that we build it internally as a startup. What we are looking is, should it be an external venture? Should it stay an internal venture? The way we make our decisions. We've been talking about Lumo and Treezor as well, which are our recent acquisition. Based on the work we've done over the last 18 months, we are now ready to accelerate, and that's why we are creating Société Générale Ventures. Société Générale Ventures is not only a corporate venture fund. We've been learning from what our peers have been doing, and it's there to support the Transform to Grow plan and the strategies of the different businesses.
It's a combination of the ability to do strategic investments with a business venturing arm. We're very structured, and we remain selective in the way we want to do this investment. We've identified about nine areas where we are prioritizing the investment in our core business and what we'll be looking for. You can see in bold the ones that we will be more scouting and more looking, which are payments and e-commerce, bank as a platform, and SME. We've also defined some prospective axes which are more looking in the future, more looking into what's next. Let me comment on them. The first one is mobility. We've been talking about ALD and their partnership with Vinli, for example, how the mobility business is evolving.
We can see some synergies between the ALD business and insurance, for example, that have the same needs. It's important to look transversely at the group level to create these synergies. Second axis is about identity and immersive experience. We can see some technology giants like Facebook that are making massive investments into this space, into camera, into augmented reality. Also, for example, the spin-off in Google called Magic Leap, that have just launched their product in the market. It's very early days, the question is, how is it going to relate to the customer experience in the business of financial services? The third one is around data monetization. Whilst these use cases are sometimes less developed in Europe, they are clearly developing in areas like Asia.
We're looking at what's going on there, for example, with Ping An, that have several products that are data monetization-based. Future of work, we've been talking about it, how every organization are evolving, and we are interested to always could and learn more about it. Last, health tech, with everything that go across our health and private banking and how this sphere and customers could evolve. That was, I hope, a good view about how we are becoming more open as an organization and more connected to our clients and also putting colleagues at the center of everything we do. We've been talking about open and grow, Christophe and I, explaining our digital strategy. We're part of the rugby team of Société Générale, and I would like to thank you all for your time today.
Good morning, Guillaume Tiberghien, Exane. I've got four questions. Sorry, three. The first one is about your EUR 4 billion of IT budget. I'd like to try and understand where you see that number maybe in 5 years. The second question is, the EUR 4 billion accounts for 16% of the revenues at Société Générale, and I'd like to understand if IT can help gain efficiency and maybe fall to 13%, or maybe have your thoughts in that respect. The third question relates to SG Ventures. What sort of envelope or budget have you allocated, and what would be the impact on your capital?
I will answer to the first two questions. The question is difficult to project ourself in 5 years for technology, because if you come back to the slide where I was showing the amount that we invest in challenger bank, you will see that it has been growing, especially, I would say, in the last 5 years, mainly because of the challenger bank and the new investment. Where we invest a lot in the past year is in the, obviously, the retail banking transformation as well as the regulatory portfolio, because the regulatory portfolio weighs about 27% of our portfolio in terms of investment. If you go back 10 years ago, it was certainly too low, but it was less than 10% at the time.
If you project yourself and you say, "What's going on in the future?" I must say that there will be reallocation. I do feel that I think that regulatory burden will certainly be less. When you think about the transformation and the fact that it's a long run, it was mentioned by all of us, it's certainly to be reallocated to other type of subject because technology is evolving very fast. I mentioned artificial intelligence. I think that the size of the investment that we'll have to do in artificial intelligence is going certainly to grow. For me, my guess would be it's going certainly to be stable for a while before we can imagine a sort of decrease. About the question about efficiency. I mentioned it.
I think that my day-to-day focus and the CIO's focus within Société Générale is really to make sure that we get the most value of this IT expense. But we do not want necessary to say that we have to cap it because the transformation of the business, and it was mentioned a lot of time by the business people themselves, in terms of digitally, is really key, is mandatory. So our goal is to make sure that the productivity of the IT staff is really there. This is why, I mentioned this indicators of proficiency. The number of release per million of EUR of change bank. This is why I mentioned our set up in India, because I think that we are obsessed with this, I would say, efficiency. But in terms of amount, it is really, for me, something in terms of percentage.
Maybe it is good to have maybe over this 16%. You see? I do not have necessary an objective on this percentage. So maybe I let you comment on the SG Ventures, Claire.
Sure. So we already announced the envelope of EUR 150 million last year. So SG Ventures is built on that. So there is no impact in the capital that was announced in the Transform to Grow plan. What we have observed and learned over the first investment is that quickly we see high level of synergies with our business, and we are capable not to just hold them centrally in the group or somewhere that really have an impact. And you have seen YUP and Moonshot, that are already on track to generate some breakeven. So that is something where we feel we have been learning, and we feel we are ready for acceleration.
It is difficult for us to benchmark a bank versus another. But for example, in your opinion, when you monitor all the projects that you have been showing, all these metrics, et cetera. In France, for example, where do you think you stand, versus, what, five, six banks that are competing, broadly speaking there. And importantly also, do you think that the change in customer access to their banking services, in particular in France, is something which will enable your regional rivals to get more into the city and into your client base, or the reverse? The banks which have a smaller network, such as yourself, compared to the big mutuals to enter their network and win share.
Well, to which extent is this a question for you, Philippe? If you want me to rephrase it.
There is a first part of the question, actually.
Where do we bank? Yeah.
About the competition. It's difficult, no? I agree with you, it's really difficult to compare yourself. This is why, I mentioned some, what I think are differentiating factors compared to competitor in the digital strategy. I think that we are pushing more on the cloud. I think that we are recognized to have pushed a lot on agility. I think that our strategy on this, API is certainly a differentiating factor as well, compared to certain French competitor. Our sourcing on the IT talent, this is why I mentioned India, is certainly a differentiator factor for the French bank. Now, I must say, then it's about, at the end of the day, all what we show you in terms of illustration of what are the output for the customer, where we are making the difference. This is where we will see the last difference.
I give you some area where I feel there is a differentiation. On the French retail, maybe you want to respond? Okay.
I would-
No, no.
I would tend to say, I don't know if it's going to answer perfectly your question, but I think we are becoming less and less dependent of our branches. We are building a platform with digital capacities, including our back offices or call centers interacting with clients. We have our relationship managers, who are themselves more and more mobile. They visit corporates, they visit professionals, they visit also including individuals. The branches, which were the only asset in the past, and which have performed very well, it's becoming now a component within an holistic approach of our customers. I think on this concept, this view, we are ahead of the pack. I'm not even sure. We are already thinking about, maybe, a part of our sell forces will not be only SG staff at some point.
Just to mention that I think it's already clear for us. We have already important bricks of this new approach.
Thank you. Could you give us some examples of areas of businesses or services where you have understood that with the development of technology and the behavior of clients, they will not be profitable? That they are clearly traps that you need to stop doing, or other competitors that are not banks will clearly become the winners.
In order to answer your question, I would tend to say that we are really reducing our cost to serve on some businesses. Probably a very important area for that, it's payments. We discussed during the break with some of you. Payments is definitely the way of entry for many competitors, and to try to disintermediate relationship between us and the clients. It remains key for us. We are continuing to invest. I think that in France, we have already very strong assets, including the credit card, which is still a very good project. We have been able to change the way people are using the credit card. I do believe a lot in the instant payment, which is an interesting output of SEPA. Instant payment, that's something that we have also invest a lot. We'll be ready at the end of the first quarter next year.
At the end of November.
Sorry, at the end of November. As of today, again, we see really the global relationship with all of our clients. Again, don't forget the professional and corporate. At this stage, on retail banking, I don't see any sub-component which don't make sense in this global approach. As it was mentioned by Claire, what we are doing is that we are really discovering new territories. I think that these new territories will generate, it's difficult to quantify yet, but significant income, and significant income based on fees. With no impact on the capital.
There's three questions.
I had a question for Claire, actually. The strategy is not dissimilar to what Arkéa has been trying to do. Arkéa is being distracted right now, but they've built a strong ecosystem in about seven to eight years. How do you perceive your own ecosystem now? When do you think you can get to the same level of aura, if you want, whereby you can really have an impact on all the different things you've identified?
I think Arkéa have a strong branding and presence in France, but not necessarily worldwide or internationally, which is our presence. I think we've been getting very good feedback in France of Société Générale interaction on the open innovation, and obviously it was with Christophe before, he can also complement what I'm saying. For example, we were the first one to open a space in Les Dunes in Paris, where we were welcoming some of the startups early, and we've done that for four years before Station F was there, before WeWork was there. Before everything became cool, we were in the game, and we are also the only bank that is present in Station F and provides services to the startups. Generally in Paris, the feedback we have about financial services provided to the ecosystem is quite good.
I think where Arkéa is probably a bit more leading than us is in their investment presence. That's why we are setting up Société Générale Ventures, because our approach has more been to test and learn, and less a traditional corporate venture fund. We can see in the industry some of the limitation of this approach about, if you want to make strategic investment and you run a corporate venture fund, at one point it's limiting because you have to make profits and you have to see how your ventures are building. What we've done is we are combining strategic investment capability with a business venturing arm, which we have proven because I've showed you some of the venture we've been able to create internally. We've been running this entrepreneurship program, where clearly we know now we've built the muscle inside the organization.
That's what I will say for France. I think internationally, clearly, there is labs that exist already outpost in different location in Africa, so in Dakar, where YUP is strongly in relation with them. In Europe, we have different species, in the U.S., in Asia. I think all the bricks are there. Obviously, me coming will put more weight because my reporting line have changed from Christophe to Frédéric directly, which want to sponsor these activities. Obviously, my reporting line will probably impact also our ability across our businesses to work and create more synergies and bring this knowledge and accelerate some of it.
Yeah. We can mention as well that we have the capacity to have the startup flows, okay? The surveillance of what is going on in the startup, because we have some investment, even if it's not more our strategy, but we have some investment in venture capital, we are sharing the startup economy or what is going on in the startup ecosystem, if I may say. Yes, you have a question for what?
Olivier Panis, Moody's. Do you see any risk related to dependence on cloud providers? How do you tackle also the security issues? We know the cloud providers have not been very wide all the time.
Obviously, it's a point of attention for us, okay? We have put together the legal setup with two main providers, Amazon and Microsoft. The legal setup is already in itself very strong, because we have the capacities, the reversibility. It has been a long negotiation, by the way, with the legal departments of those providers as well. I would say we are covered there. Now, we have obviously as well to monitor the security and control what is going on in the cloud. The infrastructure people
I've put certain norms and conditions in order to go to the cloud. I would say, just to tell you that it's not a free lunch. Everyone's going to go to the cloud without respecting certain conditions in terms of security. Obviously, I can tell you some internal debates, we are very careful to respect this type of condition in terms of IT security. Lastly, you know that we are respecting, obviously, GDPR. GDPR itself is imposing certain conditions in terms of usage of data or personal data. We are really at the top of this problematic and making sure with compliance and legal that we respect everything. That being said, the will to go to external cloud and to benefit from this context of external cloud is there.
I think that our goal is at least to move a significant part of our infrastructure to external cloud, 20% by 2020, out of the 80% that I show. Really, we know that we cannot avoid or not look at it. This is an important component of our future innovation there. Let's be fair as well. Yes, there were questions from another place.
Thank you very much for the presentations. I was wondering if you could talk a little bit more about your budgeting around the EUR 4 billion-ish number that you spend every year on technology, and also your controlling around it. What kind of criteria do you use to determine what goes into the EUR 4 billion and what doesn't? You probably have EUR 6 billion of opportunities to spend every year, you only spend EUR 4 billion. What happens if you only have EUR 3 billion of projects in a given year where you think it's attractive to invest? Maybe related to this, how much of the EUR 4 billion is actually, in a way, fixed cost represented by your employees working in technology, and how much is really, let's say, discretionary on a shorter basis, outsourced to others, or components that you buy?
If you could talk a bit about that would be great.
Maybe one thing which is important to have in mind is that out of the EUR 4 billion, I mentioned it, EUR 1.8 billion is change bank, is really new investment, new projects. It's largely dependent on the businesses because if a business wants to cut its cost to do investment in technology, this is choice. By the way, large part of them are starting to do that, and they are right to do that. I must say it's not because I am a little bit conflicted that I say that, but let's be fair, okay? As we mentioned, a digital transformation is mandatory for a lot of them. EUR 1.8 billion is certainly a change bank. There, there is a capacity to maneuver. We can say we don't invest anymore. Okay? I don't think it will happen, as this is what I said before.
EUR 1 billion is also infrastructure. Part of the EUR 1 billion is a little bit also a change bank, because you have change bank project in infrastructure, but largely a smaller part compared to the rest. You see, and this is why, out of this EUR 2 billion of plus of run the bank, you have EUR 1 billion around infrastructure. There, okay, we are doing, obviously, efficiency stream. I mentioned the cloud. I said we are going to save EUR 100 million of the EUR 1 billion by 2020. Really, when we speak also about agility, it's about also efficiency.
I'm making sure with the CIOs of Société Générale that once, okay, we have invested in changing the methodology, the agile mode, we are able to grasp, I would say, to extract 3% per year over five years out of our, I would say, investment in this new methodology that we implement. You see, efficiency is a key focus, but the bulk of the EUR 1.8 billion is dependent, obviously, of the businesses. In terms of nature of expense, what is also important to have in mind is that we have, obviously, a large part is staff out of this EUR 4 billion. I must say it's at least, I don't know, I don't have mind the figures, but it's at least more than 50%. That's right. That's in use.
We have a piece which is a little bit, obviously, a variable cost, which is that we are using, obviously, external contractors to do certain. So there, we have a sort of variability, and we to adjust our cost base one way or is the other, by the way. Our strategy is to maintain a percentage of external cost in our global cost. To try while, okay, decreasing a little bit the percentage because we feel that, obviously, it's more efficient to have internal staff, it's cheaper, and also to source this officially in, for instance, India or Romania, than to have external contractors. We have a balance to find there.
Maybe just to add on the business standpoint, there is no big secret. Of course, we have a mandatory project. That's a given. After, for business lines, that's very important to understand with his IT department what are going to be the key components for future. I'm speaking about technical component. For example, electronic signature, it was very important to develop it quickly because we knew, and we know that we are going to use it everywhere. Once you have identified these key elementary bricks, after, you have to choose what we are calling now the client's journey, which we should improve first. There are four criteria. First one, it's client satisfaction, and for this one, we are taking mostly into account what is going on on the market, and not on the banking market. Uber, Facebook, all this kind of thing. Client experience, okay?
Second criteria, of course, cost efficiency and how is it going to impact front office and back offices. The third component, and it's very important for the people, it's the benefits for the employees, the working environment. The fourth one is, of course, the impact on the compliance and risk. For example, that's why we have started, it seems obvious, but it was very important to start by the acquisition process because it's important for the client. It generates significant efficiency gains both on front office and back offices. Really, our staff was expecting for it. Finally, it helped us to address the famous KYC issue. That's the way. The good thing is that we have a roadmap which is quite clear, so we are not taking decision quarter after quarter.
We have a view, this famous Transform to Grow view, which is helping us a lot to define the priorities year after year.
Maybe we-
There were two questions I think here left. I don't know if you still want to ask your question.
There are two questions here.
Maybe we can take them at the same time, and just answer them after.
Yes. Hi. It's a similar question to the earlier questions on the EUR 4 billion. I see that the IT force component will nearly double from 2018 to 2020. Does that mean the EUR 4 billion component that's going to the IT workforce salaries will also double?
Why do you say that it will double again? Sorry.
You got on page 79 that percentage of IT workforce is going to increase from 27% to 50%.
I'm sorry. I'm confused, okay?
Uh-
No, no, no. It's,
Which number are you referring to?
No, I'm not going.
The agility one.
It's the agility.
It's agility, yeah. Different.
It's different, sorry.
Okay.
I was confused because agility is about the percentage of the IT teams which are working under a specific methodology, which is the agile methodology, which was described by Frédéric in the morning. The fact that we are able to really work in sync with the product, with the business, and we are delivering in a fast cycle mode. This is a specific methodology. You need to train your people to do so. You need to train the business as well. This is an investment, okay. It's not at all with the size of the workforce. Workforce, no. We are not planning to double it or to make it 20%. Not at all. This is why I said, okay, I see the more stability result than a usual increase as you mentioned.
Have a question on international retail and those markets where you've exited branch-based banking through disposals, Poland, Bulgaria. Would you consider going back into those markets with a mobile-only strategy, given that these are markets you're relatively familiar with? Maybe also a question for Didier as well.
Yeah.
There is no such thing that in our plan. I think that basically, and I think the YUP example shows it's a very strong asset to have a brick infrastructure and to have the click on the top of it. To build the click where we would have exited the bricks, I think would not put us in a very good position.
Thank you.
Okay.
Okay.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Thank you very much. It was very important for us to explain our vision. A vision for today, for tomorrow, and after tomorrow. Even for after tomorrow, it's coming very quickly. It was a pleasure for you, and we hope it was helpful for you. Okay? Now we can continue the interaction. We have a lunch. Thank you very much.