Michel André: Seeking to Accelerate – Why Financial Institutions Should Opt For A Cloud-Based Tech Partner

Providing a seamless customer experience is key for Banks and Payments businesses. The payment industry is filled with exciting players and standing out from the crowd is ultimately dependent on the speed and ease with which businesses can deliver cross-border payments.

Driving that expectation is the prevalence of digital tools throughout our professional and personal lives. We’ve become used to having everything at our fingertips and exactly when we want it. Gone are the days of being happy to cash a cheque in at the bank and waiting a few business days for it to clear; organisations want access to payment avenues that enable them to send to and receive funds from anywhere immediately.

So the question is, how do Financial Institutions deliver such a service when the traditional avenues for sending payments internationally are limited because of the legacy technology underpinning traditional Banks?
 

The build versus buy debate rages on

 
A debate that has raged for many years is whether organisations should build or buy the infrastructure and solutions they need to boost the experience for users. Both have their advantages, and if you have the vast resources, time, environment, and expertise to invest in developing your own bespoke solution from the ground-up, it’s an option that deserves consideration, especially if cross-border payment is not a core business or offering.

However, in the fast-moving world of payments, speed is paramount. The speed with which Financial Institutions can develop platforms, bring services to markets and evolve them to meet changing requirements all combine to affect the end-user experience, which will ultimately determine whether a service is received positively or not.

Therefore, the most effective way for Financial Institutions to quickly add innovation to their offerings and speed up cross-boarder payments is through partnering with an expert payment specialist – such as a tech-first licenced bank – and, more specifically, one that has a newly developed and completely cloud-based platform.
 

Agility, flexibility and scalability

 
Through partnering with strategic payment specialists, Financial Institutions gain access to expert talent pools that would otherwise take years – and huge investment – to build up in-house. These providers’ teams focus solely on their purpose-built solution, meaning platforms are constantly evolving, changing to meet new requirements and new technologies. As such, innovation doesn’t stagnate, an issue many businesses face when dealing with traditional Banks who have their foundations rooted in legacy technology which they’ve relied on for decades and where payments might not be the main offering or business.

The need for partners to have cloud-based infrastructure is also key. The cloud offers so much flexibility and scalability it enables Financial Institutions to be agile in the face of ever-evolving requirements. Customer demands are always changing, but when organisations are confident that they have the environment and infrastructure to quickly adapt, they are future-proofed.

For the providers themselves, a decoupled cloud infrastructure means they can update individual segments seamlessly with minimal impact on their clients’ workloads. This allows new features to be added, such as event-based payments processing and real-time reporting, all the while delivering the quality of service expected. Simply put, cloud-enabled partners are best suited to deliver innovation and quality of service that reduces payment costs time and friction to Financial Institutions.
 

Keeping up with demand in the digital age

 
Ultimately, operating in a rapid evolving industry, Financial Institutions that don’t choose suitable cloud-driven partners risk not being able to keep up with customer demand. In the digital age, everything is wanted instantaneously, and Financial Institutions must look at ways to speed up cross-border payments and boost experience through mitigating the need for restrictive legacy technology anywhere along the supply chain.

Partnering with innovative payment specialists overcomes that challenge, providing access to the most advanced, purpose-built payment rails available and at a fraction of the cost of developing in-house. When Financial Institutions are able to integrate these into their own propositions, the customer experience will only increase – leading to happy, returning clients and revenue growth.
 
Written by Michel André, CIO of Banking Circle