Daily conversations with leaders from banks and credit unions have resulted in unique insights into the evolving landscape of banking integration. Every discussion reveals a fascinating, rapidly changing world where technology and customer expectations reshape how financial institutions (FIs) operate. In this blog, I’m excited to share a few hot topics dominating our conversations this year. These trends are not just theoretical concepts but real challenges and opportunities that leaders in the banking sector grapple with daily.
1. It’s about time FIs embrace the demand for real-time APIs – and the benefits.
There’s a surge in demand for real-time APIs from fintech companies, especially those focusing on consumer services. This requirement has become a critical element of their business model. Fintechs are investing in banking services, and in return, they expect that their FI partners possess the ability to offer modern, real-time APIs for seamless integration.
For FIs, this capability is pivotal, serving as both a new avenue for revenue and a way to increase deposit opportunities. The urgency for banks now is to implement real-time APIs and develop a flexible infrastructure capable of swiftly accommodating these new services. This evolution is redefining banking products, moving towards banking-as-a-service and embedded finance while marking the advent of a new banking paradigm.
Incorporating real-time APIs significantly elevates customer experiences by providing instant access to updates and changes, ensuring that customers always have access to the latest information. Moreover, executing transactions and services in real-time enhances the overall security of banking systems by bolstering fraud detection and prevention, advanced security protocols, immediate compliance checks, and many more advantages.
2. Partners should empower the capabilities you need to unlock new business opportunities.
Speaking of embedded finance, there’s a growing focus on exploring novel, non-traditional business opportunities and user experiences in the banking sector, a challenging endeavor as it often involves navigating uncharted territories in technology and customer engagement. As a result, FIs are actively questioning who to recruit and what skills are needed to foster innovative consumer experiences. This requires hiring skilled developers, cultivating new tools and capabilities, and providing straightforward access to systems.
However, these developers are often frustrated by the lack of access to systems that are not user-friendly. Here, FIs must gain support from a partner who can assist, facilitating developers’ access to the necessary tools, including connections to legacy systems where crucial data resides.
3. Investigate scalable core solutions to meet the diverse needs of your customers.
Modern core systems such as Thought Machine and Mambu and core-provided APIs like FISERV’s Communicator Open are garnering attention for their ability to facilitate horizontal scalability. The resulting capabilities allow FIs to design tailored products for diverse customer segments. For instance, banks can establish separate ledgers tailored to various groups, such as high-net-worth individuals, students, or low-income customers, and create specialized programs for each.
This approach not only streamlines rule-setting for each group, minimizing the need for numerous exception processes, but also becomes a key competitive advantage for FIs. It enables them to rapidly meet market demands and demonstrate their expertise in catering to specific customer needs.
4. Unlock business banking’s full potential with embedded finance.
Embedded finance solutions, while not new, are reaching a zenith moment, particularly within business banking. Recognizing the importance of offering comprehensive services to businesses – from credit card processing to lines of credit – is crucial for tapping into the vast potential for deposits and revenue. This burgeoning interest provides an excellent chance for community FIs to support their business clients more extensively by integrating services directly into their operations through APIs.
To truly leverage this opportunity, banks must adopt a strategic approach that goes beyond basic service offerings. By enabling business banking customers to utilize APIs for streamlining their operations, such as executing wire transfers, monitoring account balances, and accessing lines of credit, banks can significantly enhance the efficiency of their business clients. Moreover, collaborating with a new generation of niche fintechs that seek access to credit card services, automated payment systems, and sophisticated deposit operations can open up new avenues for non-interest revenue.
These practical use cases demonstrate the value of embedded finance in improving business processes and highlight the potential for banks to generate significant non-interest income. As such, banks need to refine their sales strategies to effectively communicate the benefits of these services to their business banking customers, emphasizing the ease of integration, operational efficiency, and financial advantages. This shift towards deeply integrated financial services marks a new era in embedded finance, wherein banks are not just service providers but crucial partners in the operational success of businesses.
How PortX Is Leading the Change
At PortX, we’ve developed a modular, rapid-connecting, low-code integration and workflow tool to assist FIs in embracing these trends. Our platform has proven to reduce integration times by up to 80% and cut integration costs significantly. With a robust connector framework and a catalog of pre-built connections, we simplify and expedite the integration process.
Our observability platform ensures robust data visibility, enabling FIs to monitor integrations and address issues proactively. We’ve also developed a comprehensive payment stack supporting wire, ACH, and other real-time integrations. Our expertise in fintech integration makes us an ideal partner for FIs looking to leverage these banking trends.
This year is pivotal for banking integration, with these five trends at the forefront. Do these sound like familiar challenges that your FI is facing? Let’s talk! Get the conversation started today.
