Since November, Orange will have a bank, in addition to its usual business as a telecommunications operator. The company from France, which already has more than 300,000 financial clients in that country, will open before the end of next month its entity in Spain. In principle, it will collect clients among teleco subscribers, but the company intends to be available to any citizen through an application and a cloud service (in the cloud).

"We are the mobile bank of a company that knows how a mobile phone works," Narciso Perales, head of Orange Bank in Spain, explained yesterday in the presentation of the company's results for the first nine months of the year. Clients may contract checking or savings accounts, credit or debit cards, in addition to making transactions and, of course, applying for loans. That is, Orange Bank is not a consumer credit system, such as the Movistar Pay project that Telefónica maintains with CaixaBank, or the financial services that MásMóvil can provide together with Cetelem. Orange Bank is, as its name implies, a bank.

The French company, therefore, has become a pioneer teleco in a new branch of business that could be consolidated in the coming years among its competitors. Although Orange Bank works thanks to an app prepared for the main operating systems of mobile devices (iOS and Android), the company will use its network of stores, which will serve as branches. In November, the new entity will use its 26 own establishments throughout Spain, but in the future it intends to take advantage of the 1,200 stores in which it is present.

Different trends converge in this phenomenon. On the one hand, the revenues from telecos coming from consumers decrease, as was evident in the accounts announced yesterday by Orange, so diversification is imposed, as Laurent Paillassot, CEO of Orange Spain acknowledged. On the other hand, the fintech facilities (technological developments in finance) attract companies outside that sector, especially if they have strong stable customer bases and a good assortment of data. That is the case of operators like Orange.

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