How should financial institutions think about their future IT needs to stay competitive and offer superior value and experiences for customers?
In our opinion, the days are numbered for monolithic software systems being custom developed for financial institutions seeking to streamline their current operations. In a rapidly developing world where regulations are continually changing, together with customer needs and distribution channels, the focus should be on selecting the right standardized platform to use as the foundation.
What do we mean by this? Well, we think that a lot of stuff can be standardized but not the customer experience. It will be critical for financial institutions to accept the fact that their IT should be viewed as an opportunity and an asset as opposed to a necessary evil.
A good core platform should offer the basics to take care of things like accounts, transactions, customers and financial instruments. The platform should also have an excellent API which the financial institution could use to let its own developers extend the platform with their own software. Having an API in the core platform also enables the financial institution to allow partners to interact with it and will make them PSD2 compliant from day one.
Another vital area is configurability, you should be able to configure a lot of things so that you don’t have to be dependent on new functionality being implemented from the platform developer when it comes to trivial matters.
Let us continue by describing briefly how we have reasoned on the above points within Bricknode.
Standardization and API
Bricknode Financial Systems (BFS) is a core platform with numerous add-ons or modules that can be activated in our marketplace, or “app store” if you will. The core platform offers a comprehensive API where almost everything can be conducted programmatically in the platform.
Our users are then encouraged to build their own specialized components like customer front ends, mobile apps or whatever it could be that they would like to offer their end customer.
Configurability
BFS is a very dynamic platform, the user can create their own account types, account type behaviors, transaction types with associated automated transaction chains and much more, directly in the graphical user interface (GUI) or by merely uploading XML-based configuration files straight into the GUI.
The next ten years of financial IT should be focused on modular solutions based on generic platforms as the core and specialized components for delivering the customer experience!