Saxo Bank moves toward open banking in partnership with Thoughtworks

Saxo Bank has selected Thoughtworks as its strategic digital partner as part of the investment bank’s move to become a data driven, open banking financial institution. Thoughtworks integrates strategy, design and engineering to drive digital innovation.

The partnership will help the bank to pursue the creation of an ecosystem of multiple stakeholders – traders, institutional investors and 300+ investment banks.

Thoughtworks has built a data governance platform that enables a self-service data catalog of high quality data assets. This complements Saxo Bank’s stream-first data platform and enables the effortless creation and consumption of data assets.

Implementing data governance with data mesh principles alleviates challenges around data visibility, quality, and access and building data trust and self-service capabilities.

This has empowered teams and decentralized decision making, with the bank moving its open banking objective ahead and also continuously improve upon it.

Graham Stirling, Head of Data Platforms at Saxo Bank, said: “Saxo have been on the journey towards a federated data architecture since late 2018, during which time we have leaned heavily on Thoughtworks’ leadership in the emerging space of ‘data mesh’.

“When it came to validating and shaping our thinking about governance of the mesh, Thoughtworks were at the top of our list as a consulting partner. Over the course of a 15-month engagement, the Thoughtworks team have proved themselves to be a key collaborator in not only shaping but also executing on our vision.”

Sudhir Tiwari, managing director for Thoughtworks in India, said: “As a digital native disruptor, we have been able to effectively partner with Saxo Bank and move them closer to realizing their ambitious vision of monetizing data through a whitelisted open banking platform. We leveraged our expertise of building platform ecosystems and data-driven business models by adopting data mesh principles to address their challenges.”

Saxo has recently added stocks and CFDs on U.S. exchanges to its offering on TradingView, a very popular social trading platform boasting advanced charting tools for stocks and FX instruments.

The online trading and investment specialist already offered trading on 182 Forex and Metals pairs via TradingView. Now, Saxo clients can trade both FX and a range of over 3,000 individual stocks and single-stock CFDs through the social trading platform.

Traders can benefit from the platform’s charting tools and Saxo’s pricing and offering as the trading firm increasingly caters to investors looking to gain exposure to stocks and CFDs, a trend that has been going for some time now.

Saxo Bank has appointed Mette Ingeman Pedersen as the new Group Chief Financial Officer, reporting directly to Kim Fournais, CEO & Founder. She will succeed Lars Kufall Beck who will join TopDanmark.