Finovate is part of the Informa Connect Division of Informa PLC
This site is operated by a business or businesses owned by Informa PLC and all copyright resides with them. Informa PLC's registered office is 5 Howick Place, London SW1P 1WG. Registered in England and Wales. Number 8860726.
This is a sponsored post from Accusoft.
Accusoft researched several of the factors driving technology and innovation in the financial services industry to better understand the current and future role of FinTech in the marketplace. Find out what they learned, discover assets that can help you solve your content processing, conversion, and automation challenges, and learn more about their FinTech solutions >>
The below is a sponsored post, from Gold Sponsors of FinovateEurope Digital 2021, InterSystems.
The COVID-19 crisis has thrown a spotlight on the inefficiencies underlying many functional areas of financial firms and caused executives to reevaluate operational resilience in light of increasing volumes and volatility. There’s been a lot of industry discussion about the potential of Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence (AI) to tackle challenges ranging from regulatory change management to improving the client experience.
AI has huge potential to augment and transform current market practices, but organizations need to make sure they are laying the groundwork for successful implementation by considering the underlying data infrastructure required to turn these technology ambitions into reality.
In this white paper, Firebrand Research discusses how to tackle the complex issue of data management and shares key reasons to invest in a smart data fabric, including:
Read the full whitepaper here >>
The below is a sponsored post by FinovateFall Digital exhibitor, Invest Puerto Rico.
Puerto Rico is poised to become the global model for how to roll out cutting-edge tools that enable blockchain, AI, and the Internet of Things (IoT). All of these technologies are designed to transform nearly every sector, notably financial services, bioscience, and aerospace. Technology represents the changes imminent in the 4th industrial revolution. Proper implementation and growth of these tools has been a critical priority contributing to the island’s economic diversity, development, and competitiveness.
Advances in these fields would not be possible without a supportive Information & Communications Technology (ICT) network. As an island, Puerto Rico depends on its ability to communicate with the world to do business. As such, companies benefit from extensive island-wide 5G, broadband access, established LoRa network capabilities, and broad satellite connections. Every element of this network ensures producers are connected to suppliers, customers, and business partners. Puerto Rico’s tech expertise and nationally unique international banking policies—along with the growing demand for effective financial solutions and resources—has led to a boom in innovative fintech and investing services that extend to every industry.
Fintech is growing fast, at a rate of 25% per year through 2022. Puerto Rico’s close proximity to the world’s financial center – New York City – gives island-based fintech firms the opportunity to remain connected while taking advantages of key local benefits such as STEM talent, local financial literacy, and attractive tax incentives. Puerto Ricans are open to technology providing financial solutions where traditional banks do not. Here are a few facts you might have known about the island.
Puerto Rico also leads the region in fintech innovation, and this is evident in the wide use of digital banking tools, mobile financial applications, and globally recognized payment processing technology. Banking with digital assets is quickly becoming a reality and the blockchain community is pushing innovations for tax credit trading and how to sell utility tokens within tax incentive regulations. The island is leading the way in helping fintech, insurtech, and blockchain become more ubiquitous. The local financial services industry is perfect for global companies and start-ups looking for a cost-effective domicile or fertile ground to develop ideas, scale, and expand into neighboring markets.
Combine U.S. federal regulations and exemptions with local tax benefits and operating incentives, and you get the only place for international financial entities and insurers on U.S. soil: Puerto Rico. The island offers companies experienced banking and insurance markets, with a broad base of financial experts in U.S. and international laws and regulations. Puerto Rico stands to be an international leader in the finance and insurance industries by providing banks and insurers, companies, and individuals unparalleled access to the U.S. market with global regulations.
Puerto Rico is the nexus of opportunity. Contact a member of the Invest Puerto Rico Business Development team to learn how you can locate your startup or established business to the island.
Leading the way in strengthening the island as a world-class business destination is the newly formed Invest Puerto Rico (InvestPR), a non-profit investment promotion organization created by law, via Act 13 – 2017. InvestPR’s mission is clear: promote the island as a competitive investment jurisdiction that attracts new business and capital investment to the island. Our vision is to be a transformational and results-oriented accelerator of economic development in Puerto Rico.
Photo by Tatiana Rodriguez on Unsplash
The following is a sponsored post by Tracy Schlabach, Senior Manager, Product and Customer Marketing, Accusoft.
Digital transformation has been on the radar of most financial institutions for years. In a 2020 Digital Transformation Survey by BDO of financial services professionals, 68% of respondents in 2019 saw a growth in revenue directly related to digital investments. While many have made digital transformation a priority, some have faced roadblocks including risk-aversion and lack of corporate sponsorship.
With COVID-19 sweeping the globe, priorities are shifting, emphasizing the need for digital transformation. As noted in a state of the industry report authored by the Institute of International Finance and Deloitte, “COVID-19 has generated leadership and organizational support by highlighting the need for digital transformation as a means to reach customers and maintain operational resilience.” Of those surveyed by BDO prior to the COVID-19 outbreak, 36% see industry disruption as the primary digital threat. In addition, a recent survey by IDG Research states that 59% of respondents are seeing an acceleration of digital transformation in their companies driven by the pandemic.
Now that implementing the digital strategy has taken center stage on the fintech roadmap, developers are looking to meet the needs of leadership as well as customers and employees in a timely and budget efficient manner.
The name digital transformation embodies a wide assortment of initiatives, from the customer engagement experience to transforming legacy systems. In an article by The Financial Brand, financial executives were asked to select their top digital transformation priorities for 2021. Out of the long list of initiatives, four of the highest priorities are:
Financial institutions are prioritizing several diverse initiatives to remain relevant during the global pandemic. Project managers need to shorten development time, meet executive mandates, and launch products that significantly improve the employee and customer experience.
Development teams can effectively meet those timelines by partnering with software manufacturers who build and maintain software development kits (SDKs) and application programming interfaces (APIs). Developers can integrate these SDKs and APIs into their product offerings to add unique document processing capabilities. By partnering with a high-tech software solution, your team can save development time, shorten sprints, and reduce maintenance cost. While these are significant benefits, partnering and integrating third-party software manufacturers come with many advantages, including the ability to:
Let’s take a deeper look at each of these advantages.
Integrate vs. Build & Maintain Document Processing Libraries – Consider how many different file formats are available in the market for submitting data to financial institutions. Fintech users receive everything from Word documents to PDFs to images taken with cell phones. All of those file formats need to be taken into consideration when building a fintech application that streamlines the process of capturing data from those files. Building out libraries of code that can address every possible option is extremely cumbersome and time-consuming. However, developers can leverage an SDK or API that has been developed specifically for document processing and open up time to focus on their core competencies.
Access to Support and Engineering Experts – When financial institutions embed third-party document and image processing solutions, they are also gaining access to a team of experts. At Accusoft, each customer has access to technical support and product developers that have helped hundreds of companies with implementing and utilizing these document processing SDKs and APIs. Digital transformation is a pressing concern for financial organizations. You can help them meet their needs with our SDKs and APIs. Get this new functionality up and running quickly in your application so your developers can focus on more mission-critical tasks.
Reduce Time to Market – As noted in the report by BDO, “Most financial services companies anticipate high returns on revenue and profitability from digital transformation.” Project managers that prioritize research and implement third-party software solutions can significantly reduce the time to market. This, in turn, will allow their company to realize profits faster than their competition.
With the recent changes in the world, the need for digital transformation is not slowing down. Financial institutions that prioritize those initiatives and research ways to develop and implement their new offerings quickly will be ahead in realizing revenues and returning profits to shareholders.
Accusoft is a software development company specializing in content processing, conversion, and automation solutions. From out-of-the-box and configurable applications to APIs built for developers, we help organizations solve their most complex content workflow challenges. Our patented solutions enable users to gain insight from content in any format, on any device with greater efficiency, flexibility, and security. Visit us at www.accusoft.com
The following is a sponsored post from InterSystems, Gold Sponsors of FinovateWest Digital, November 23 through 25, 2020.
In an increasingly digital world filled with chatbots, tap-and-go payments, and “buy now, pay later” credit lines, hyper-personalization is the new frontier on top of a new frontier in financial services.
Hyper-personalization enables financial services organizations to leverage the huge volumes of customer data they have in their systems efficiently and effectively to make more specific and more relevant product recommendations, such as an increase of a credit limit at the point of sale, or a list of previous interactions pushed to the chatbot, allowing it to pick up where it last left off. It does so by analyzing the data available to it through the power of analytics, artificial intelligence (AI), and machine learning.
It offers immense growth opportunities for all financial services providers if they can cater to small and specific groups. Hyper-personalization can foster loyalty in an era in which loyalty has declined, and it pushes the next generation of consumers and investors towards those financial services which can be agile in what they offer.
Traditional firms and hyper-personalization
Traditional firms are often encumbered by processes built up over decades. These processes are ingrained and necessary for them to have operated the way they have successfully and for so long.
To these firms, those same processes hinder the uptake of advances such as AI, data analytics and machine learning.
Yet these and other new technologies do not require traditional firms to re-imagine how processes work, nor does implementing have to be as obtrusive and disruptive as a full digital transformation initiative, for example. Rather, technology can be implemented in the background and effectively manage itself, be installed quickly and efficiently in existing systems without disrupting the rest of the business. Some can even run adjacently to everything else the business does.
Traditional firms have decades or more worth of data. Analytics tools, AI, and machine learning work together to make sense of it all, wherever it might be and in whatever language it might be in, and surface actionable insights from all of it. Importantly, these technologies work in the background, without disrupting any mission-critical processes.
This may sound like a lot of steps and go against the grain of what we’ve been discussing in this article. But rest assured, all of these technologies can be implemented with little to no disruption to operations, and they work in the background while delivering key insights for the data almost in real-time. It’s through using these technologies that traditional firms can, at last, unlock those rich and extensive streams of historical data dating back decades, which in turn provides a clear method to fostering loyalty. Research shows that customers want a hyper-personalized experience. According to Accenture, 91 percent of consumers are more likely to shop with brands who recognize them, remember them, and provide them with relevant offers and recommendations.
Traditional firms have a hyper-personalization advantage thanks to possessing a trove of legacy data and brand recognition. They just need to embrace what is available to help leverage their data and analytics to get them to their intelligent future — and trust that it can and will co-exist with existing processes.
If they allow technology to do the heavy lifting for them alongside their existing processes, traditional firms will be able to leverage decades of data to their advantage and engage in new ways with customers, without having to re-invent the wheel.
Ahead of FinovateFall Digital next week, we hear from Chad Hamblin, Global Industry Director of Financial Services at Microsoft, one of Finovate’s Gold Sponsors. Hamblin explores why success will come down to understanding and empathizing with your client. Dig a little deeper into this topic with Microsoft’s eBook on the topic: Reimagine the client experience in wealth management.
COVID-19 has put a strain on everyone. We’ve all navigated social isolation, uncertain investment projections, and remote work environments. Regardless of the experience, this time away has left a haze over individuals and organizations alike. We’re not just unsure what comes next, we’re questioning the very processes we’ve accepted to this point.
Investors are feeling a new tension that makes small pain points all the more obvious. Voice automation, fixed fees, commissions — what clients once accepted as the cost of doing business are suddenly under intense scrutiny. Clients aren’t obligated to trust a major firm with their financial future, and now they’re acting on the opportunity to move their money elsewhere.
So how can wealth management firms adapt their strategies (and identities) to regain that trust? It all starts with understanding the client.
Over the years, many wealth firms operated under a one-size-fits-most model — if the client fell into a specific demographic, then the firm provided a specific portfolio. Empowered by the Digital Age and amplified by this pandemic, a growing number of modern clients are looking for a wealth management partner—someone willing to listen to their ambitions, dreams, and goals and recommend actions catered to their unique circumstances. These clients want to feel identified, seen, and valued; they want to feel like more than an account number. Organizations can deliver on that expectation by creating a holistic client experience — a strategic client approach that uses technology and relationship-building to create a more inclusive perspective on the client’s needs, interests, and ambitions.
Delivering a holistic client experience comes to life in three ways: portfolios, services, and communications.
While holistic client experiences serve as the star of wealth management’s future, next-generation technologies will be the foundation of these efforts. Trending tools like AI, life event and goal tracking, market risk analysis, smart portfolio allocation, and project automation equip organizations with the tools they need to build more responsive, reliable offerings for clients.
Imagine how predictive analytic tools will help determine the stability of future investments or the time employees could save on data entry through automation. Today’s technologies grant employees the tools they need to deliver a holistic customer experience by making their day-to-day tasks more efficient and effective.
By creating a holistic client experience, wealth management firms become a reliable asset during hardship and a celebrated ally in victories. Right now, clients around the world are reassessing their investments for fear of a future crisis. In many cases, COVID-19 has fundamentally upset the way many clients view wealth management and building. It’s up to firms to empathize with those concerns and shape their efforts to bring peace of mind.
With a multitude of wealth firms fighting for their dollars, today’s clients are increasingly taking their funds to firms that demonstrate a conscious effort to understand their ambitions beyond executing trades. Wealth management firms that position themselves as true advisors and champion the hopes and dreams of their clients can foster trusting and long-lasting relationships.
The alternative is a slow descent into transactional business, commoditization, and ultimately irrelevance. The holistic wealth management firm is prepared to advocate for the best interests of their clients.
For more insights into how today’s firms can steel themselves for tomorrow’s challenges, read Microsoft’s latest eBook.
The following is a sponsored post from Michael Hom, Head of Financial Solutions at InterSystems, Gold Sponsors of FinovateFall Digital 2020, September 14 through 18, 2020.
Currently, external factors like the COVID-19 pandemic mean that the global economy has become increasingly volatile and capital markets firms are having to work harder than ever to make sure users, both retail and institutional, can continue to trade without interruption.
As these financial organizations look to mitigate risk in this period of uncertainty, gaining operational resilience, implementing risk mitigation strategies, and having the right technology in place will be crucial to continue to deliver value to customers, comply with regulations, get ahead of the competition – and, most importantly, maintain trust.
Given this, the pressure for incumbents to upgrade infrastructure is only increasing, but challenges remain in doing so. While the pandemic may have been the linchpin for organizations to start embracing new technologies there are still barriers to overcome and best practices to be put into play to not only mitigate risk, but also prepare capital markets for what’s to come in the future:
Critical to mitigating risk is ensuring data is available quickly and easily accessible. For many capital markets firms this is an area where they struggle due to a significant amount of legacy technology in their infrastructure and, consequently, data siloes.
Connecting these disparate systems will be vital to not only help them with performance issues they have today, adapting to situations such as mass remote working, for example, but also so they are capable of growing with them into the future.
This requires them to adopt solutions that can seamlessly run, scale, and expand into the cloud. By replacing legacy infrastructure, they will have the benefit of providing new technologies and innovations access to their wealth of valuable data.
These solutions should also be location agnostic to allow capital markets firms to be agile and take advantage of new technology and services and bring that into their existing infrastructure.
As these institutions look to replace their legacy technology, they should focus their investments on two key areas.
First, they should invest in platform scalability as being able to scale up as the market spikes is crucial and can be a major differentiator. This scalability can even give firms a competitive edge with some firms having recently gained market share solely due their ability to scale up.
The second area of investment should be in analytics and automation that can support and, in some cases, reduce the manual-intensive workload. We’ve already seen increases in algorithmic trading and customer chatbot technologies, while many organizations within the financial services industry use AI to automate processes, such as fraud checks and compliance.
With less time spent on time-intensive manual tasks, capital markets firms will be able to direct their attention to more value-adding services for their clients. The use of AI will help to spot patterns and anomalies in those patterns much faster for fraud prevention, while also reducing the risk of human error.
Within capital markets firms, there is a growing requirement to be able to access real-time data so these organizations can simplify their stack and get access to transactions that are happening in the moment. This will allow them to produce more time-sensitive reporting so they can make appropriate business decisions and better comply with regulatory requirements.
Data fabrics are fast becoming a key trend within data management across the board, helping to reduce friction. Improving the accuracy, availability and accessibility of data and should also be a consideration as capital markets weather this period of uncertainty and beyond.
A data fabric that uses the latest technology will help organizations to better grasp data governance, ensure that their data is clean and accurate, to harmonize that data where appropriate, and make it more accessible. All of these will help them derive more value and better insights from their data to help drive their enterprises and those of their customers forward.
As capital markets firms look beyond this period of volatility to thriving long term, it’s vital they embrace agility by implementing modern technology with a focus on analytics and automation. This will allow them to quickly adapt to changing and new business needs by helping them to make use of their data, analyze it, monetize it, and turn it into actionable intelligence.
In an increasingly competitive landscape, where new market entrants aren’t weighed down by legacy technology and architectures, this will be a key differentiator and enable capital markets firms to take advantage of new opportunities within the market faster.
If you want to hear more about this subject, listen to this webinar in which InterSystems takes a deep dive into the challenges facing capital markets firms and how they can mitigate risk, alongside a panel of other industry experts from Northern Trust, Westwood Group, and SIX Securities & Exchanges. Or read InterSystems‘ latest blog posts on Data Excellence.
The following is a sponsored blog post by Chris Papathanassi, Global Solution Lead, Lending with Finastra. Papathanassi discusses the two challenges facing lenders: data quality and ensuring a true “golden source” and leveraging real value through data connections. Find out more in the full report >>
Today, digital is the only way to do business. But even though everything they do can be expressed in ones and zeros, most financial service organizations simply aren’t set up to be truly digital. In the context of the current disrupted, volatile and remote-working global economy, doing digital brilliantly is now a matter of survival and urgency for many financial firms – no longer simply a ‘nice to have’.
Digital transformation is difficult for even the simplest business models, and in lending in particular, there is a real challenge. When it can take up to three months to get cash out of the door, it’s hard to see how any bank can keep up with the digital shift. There is a continued dependency in lending on paper documentation and face-to-face contact.
Despite this, the challenges of digitalization are more than balanced out by the potential benefits. You’re likely aware of a few of these already:
So, what needs to happen for lending to get there?
One of the key issues is data quality and the “golden source”. The bespoke nature of lending makes it hard to maintain data quality and consistency. Lenders have their own individual nuances and conventions. And corporate borrowers that have lending relationships with many different organizations will download and manipulate data so it’s in a format they can work with.
As one major bank asked us: “How can we ensure what the source of truth is across different applications?”
What’s more, as data moves through different systems in a digitalized and connected world, it changes too.
This points to the second challenge, which is that digitalized lending data is only valuable when it can be connected to the other pieces of the puzzle, to provide the big picture lenders and borrowers need. Right now, firms are still downloading data into Excel, manipulating it, and re-sending it.
Digitalization plus API capabilities, however, makes it possible for stakeholders to see the same pieces of data in the same state. It’s this connectivity that is key to realizing the full benefits of digitalization and addressing the “source of truth” issue.
Digitalization also opens data to new technologies such as AI, machine learning, and robotic process automation, which can create new efficiencies and value for banks and customers. And for processes such as syndicated lending that have multiple players, it can be combined with cloud technology to enable more collaboration and better access to a single source of truth.
APIs in the cloud can make innovation more accessible to banks, overcoming the challenges of integrating in-house and external products. In essence, on platforms, banks have access to pre-integrated, interoperable solutions and better access to the broader financial services ecosystem, where they can explore innovations and consume them at speed.
This potentially changes the shape of the lending industry, opening up interesting questions. What do banks want to be? Leaders in the lending business or providers of specialist products? With digitalization both options are possible, creating an opportunity for lenders to add value and build their lending businesses – or to disintermediate healthily.
Today we feature a sponsored post from Celfocus. Henrique Cravo also sits down with Greg Palmer on the Finovate Podcast to talk about intelligent use of data, the importance of tailored experiences, and overcoming barriers left by legacy systems. To get a deeper insight into the topic register for the webinar: Delivering Customer Knowledge Augmentation and Activation here >>
There aren’t many industries where organisations have so much data about customers for such a long period of time. For example, I have had the same bank for the last 25 years which, by the way, is the same as my father’s.
My bank has been my partner when I wanted to go to university or buy my first apartment. It knows how much I make and where I spend it, but I never truly felt they used that knowledge to either enrich my experience or deliver tailored offers. Why is that?
There is a wealth of value to explore in untapped customers’ financial behaviour and banks are in prime position to reap the benefits, but they need to adapt.
The transformation has already begun with banks introducing more channels, learning best practices from digital native banks and fintechs, and even creating new digital business models to test what works, aiming to later integrate those learnings into the core business.
Still, banks are drowning in data and have very little insight on how to transform it into actionable knowledge to better serve customers, personalise offers, and deliver a consistent customer experience.
Furthermore, through segmentation, banks can use their knowledge about current customers to define campaigns and other initiatives to fulfill one of their main objectives, attract new customers. Their continuous appetite for growth steams from delivering unique and innovative value propositions to current but also future customers which today can be, in many situations, hallenging.
From risk takers, tech-savvy, and hungry for innovation customers to techavoiders that value human touch, banks must accommodate different engagement approaches and insights to differentiate customer profiles. This happens not because they don’t have the data, but because they can’t mine it.
It’s clear that very soon ‘Customer intelligence’ will be the most important predictor of revenue growth and profitability. The use of behavioural analytics will be key to identify customer friction points and there will be a surge in building technological capabilities to get more insight on customers’ needs.
By nature, financial products are complex and both companies and individuals are deeply affected by their financial choices, so there’s a foreseeable need for contact, ensuring a correct understanding of what is at stake.
Bank tellers, financial advisers, and other resources are key in accommodating customers’ requests and providing value-added and timely information. They benefit first-hand from customer insights, which enable them to provide not only a better service, but also to increase the customer value by offering the best solutions.
In addition to assisted channels, there is the emergence of self-service applications aiming to allow customers to engage on their terms, when they want, going as far as allowing customers to configure product features, including pricing. If, in this case, the human factor is eliminated, the need for accuracy is even greater, otherwise, the sale may fail or the inquiry can go unanswered.
Customer expectations have changed mainly due to the experience from other digital native organisations, coming or not, from the financial sector. The easy interactions, the tailored offers, integration between physical and digital channels or the unmatched service, creates a gap between what many financial institutions can deliver and what customers are getting elsewhere.
Responding to the pressure to change, banks must find a balance between opening but guaranteeing trust continues to be paramount, at all levels. Up to this point, the perspectives presented argued for the need for banks to not only gain insights and knowledge from the data they already have, but also the challenge in adjusting to new customers’ demands and how they choose to engage.
However, the biggest challenge is how to orchestrate these two dimensions and provide customers with experiences that leverage the knowledge banks have delivered in a seamless way, using whatever channel customers choose from.
The holy grail of an enhanced experience in the banking sector is to have an holistic and end-to-end perspective of the customer experience.
Celfocus Customer Knowledge Augmentation and Activation is a modular and integrated framework tailored to leverage banks’ customer knowledge and deliver tailored services.
This framework is anchored in 2 main modules. The first comprises the tools and technologies to augment customer knowledge by activating every single customer through automated AI and Cognitive data insights, and the second aims at delivering tailored experiences that trigger new targets, portfolios, and customer lock.
By encompassing the Customer Value Augmentation and Enhance Customer Experience modules, the solution provides banks’ full control of the customer journey from planning to execution, focusing on building the technology capabilities to get more intelligence about customers’ needs, and how to best serve them.
Download the full whitepaper from Celfocus, Customer Knowledge
Augmentation and Activation >>
Financial organizations are managing mass amounts of information on a daily basis.
Whether it’s a loan application, credit approval, or new customer records, sharing documents securely is key for effective task completion and departmental collaboration.
With a variety of document formats needed for each of these tasks, professionals must often switch from application to application to complete processes. Standard processes are often outdated and inefficient.
Discover how financial organizations can streamline their workflows and collaborate more effectively within their current applications.
Read the Accusoft infographic to learn more.
It’s the FraudTech day of the Finovate Fintech Halftime Review, and we welcome Jeff Tinsley, CEO of MyLife to talk fraud management and prevention and how MyLife can be used by financial institutions to educate and add value for their consumers.
David Penn, our own Finovate Analyst, asks what sort of things go into creating a Reputation Score, and how MyLife protects people from fraud?
Watch the full interview.
Find out more about MyLife and get in touch with Tim (timp@mylife-inc.com) for any questions or partnership inquiries.
As part of our Finovate FinTech Halftime Review, Finovate Analyst David Penn sat down with João Lima Pinto, Chairman of ITSCREDIT. With nearly 20 years of solid experience in the financial sector, actively participating in the design and implementation of innovative omnichannel and credit solutions, Pinto has garnered much success by leading a variety of business development, product and project management, business analysis, and product operations functions.
Among the topics discussed include ITSCREDIT’S Genie Advisor app, how the company has seen the COVID-19 crisis impact its customer base, and its plan to address the challenges and move forward in 2020.
Watch the full interview now.