Difficult task of digital transformation: Developing banking ecosystems of the future

The banking sector is one of the more experienced in technology-based business development. The first wave of digitisation gave us most of what surrounds us today, like mobile applications and the digitisation of internal banking processes, which resulted in better efficiency and cost reduction. While the process has been slowly carried out for decades, the industry knows it’s time to take the next big step forward. For many years, there have been talks of creating a banking ecosystem to maximise the banks’ offer, even with non-banking products or products loosely related to the industry. 

In the current fast-paced era, it is evident that everyone can order any service via one app; there is no longer a place for one-thing-focused companies. During previous years, the banking sphere has significantly changed, but what remains the same is customer trust, recommendations, and engagement. To remain the first customer choice, banks need to answer a fundamental question: how many of their customers’ problems can their services resolve? The answer is simple: as many as possible to be comprehensive and ahead of the market. 

But let’s start from scratch: what is the reasoning behind the digital transformation? Apart from the banks being institutions of public trust, we cannot forget that they are, at the same time, companies focused on sales, growth, and expansion. To reach these objectives, they must be competitive, provide better or more services than competitors, and keep their existing customer portfolio. Currently, we’re facing the times when the bank’s customers are also looking into managing different services as simply as possible to save time. Of course, there is always a possibility of creating additional divisions and extending existing business, but to make it quicker and more successful, it seems best to use established, reliable solutions. So, how do we go through digital transformation in the best way? 

The crucial element in the digital journey is choosing a future-proof solution that offers flexibility and scalability and, most importantly, covers most requirements – from a business, technology, security, and regulatory perspective. Financial institutions should keep in mind the ease of changes in the future when the market will bring us new features and must-have capabilities. 

For many years, IT companies such as Comarch have been constantly developing products and services to serve the most sophisticated customers across the globe. Amongst the well-served approaches adopted were Open APIs and microservices architecture. Thanks to that, acceleration and extension in any area are way quicker and smoother. The main objective of such an attitude is to combine a set of micro-products from which the bank can freely compose an ultimate solution according to its needs. The latest microservices technology allows for round-the-clock availability, as disabling one module doesn’t affect the others. Thus, the system can run without interruption. In addition, the API-focused approach allows for cooperation with fintechs and expanding the offer with additional products without the need to develop them on the bank’s side. 

Considering the challenges that banks struggle with at once – legacy systems, repeatedly changing regulations, geopolitical situations, and constantly growing competition not only from the financial sector – using systems that can easily adapt to new changes and allow for swift feature upgrades would be the most advantageous. 

Partnerships are also gaining importance continuously. To create a complex platform that complies with all regulatory requirements and simultaneously provides best-in-breed services, forming a coalition seems inevitable – also across sectors.  

• Check out the Comarch Open Platform