Once digital banking solutions, now entire ecosystems: Are you caught up?
In this age of digital disruption, when Software as a Service (SaaS) is nearly a household term, the global fintech community in particular has seen a staggering proliferation of solutions aimed at transforming and digitizing the customer experience. It makes sense – most of us now interact with some form of digital banking on a daily basis. Checking your account balance, making a loan payment from a mobile device, and sending money to friends and family have all relatively quickly become routine digital interactions. And, with the popular trend of open-API approaches to design, which helps break down the barriers to integration and makes it easier for new solutions to break into the digital space, it’s unlikely that the transformation of this area will slow any time soon.
Perhaps this is thanks in-part to social media platforms that have helped shape our expectations of a modern user experience and created a community of customers who increasingly expect alerts and delivery methods to be immediately available and customizable. Common examples might include balance threshold alerts (when a balance goes above or below a certain amount), transaction type alerts (if an ACH transaction happens on an account), sign-in alerts, and transaction approval requests for commercial/business banking. These alerts are expected to be received via mobile push notification, SMS, email, or a combination of these immediately.
One of the main issues with alerts from digital banking however, is how events are handled within an FI’s core processor. If the core does not have a system in which it can alert third parties to activity on an account, there is no ideal way to pull this data into a digital banking environment. It’s for this reason that a tight integration between the digital banking platform and the core is essential.
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