This multinational financial services company serves customers in 61 countries across Europe, Africa, South America, and Asia. It is one of Europe's leading financial services groups and has been a major industry player for over 150 years, supporting 30 million clients every day with 133,000 staff around the globe. It is a market force in most countries in which it has a presence, offering an ecosystem of subsidiary companies focused on insurance, pensions and other financial services.
Background
This multinational financial services company — one of Europe’s leading financial services groups, supporting 10s of millions of clients – needed to innovate its business, but found itself hampered by a cumbersome path to digital transformation and modernization. With complex legacy systems and a commitment to satisfy diverse compliance requirements, the bank needed a technology platform that would enable internal and external system integrations, while also allowing them to innovate and deploy financial products and back-office operations. They chose the FintechOS platform for its unique ability to extract and extend legacy system capabilities, while also accelerating the launch, service, and expansion of financial products.
Challenges
A large financial institution with a complicated legacy infrastructure, the bank needed hybrid solutions that could work across its vast array of products and subsidiaries, fulfill existing compliance requirements, and be quick to deploy and scale. Starting initially in one business area and expanding to others based on proven results, FintechOS has enabled the bank to reshape three of its businesses.
Retail Banking
In Retail Banking the primary goal was to roll out a digital onboarding journey that would maximize new sign-ups and minimize abandonment rates. There was immense pressure for the bank to act quickly due to competitors, who were already driving digital transformation forward.
There was no seamless digital onboarding process in place: the only way customers could open an account was to visit a branch and manually sign paperwork with an agent. The bank’s systems could not effectively integrate with each other. This resulted in gaps in the data needed for a seamless and secure customer origination and onboarding experience.
Merchant Banking
In Merchant Banking the main difficulty was integration, specifically the connection between the legacy core system and the new digital origination journeys. One of the reasons the bank’s loan origination processes had remained paper-based for so long was the challenge the internal IT teams faced connecting the legacy core system to a modern front-end.
In addition, the project was under tight deadlines. The bank needed to deliver digital point-of-sale origination for its merchant partners in advance of Black Friday, the biggest day of the year for retail businesses. This meant that the new offering had to be delivered in 20 weeks, while covering loan originations for seven different products. Merchants needed a solution that could be installed quickly and cope with peak demand right out of the box.
Insurance
In Insurance the bank was challenged with creating a new product offering, in a short timeframe. With the goal of becoming more agile, as well as reducing reliance on the group’s IT systems, the company wanted a new system architecture that could go from policy management, to quote & bind for direct and bancassurance channels, and everything in-between.
Solution
The bank selected the FintechOS platform for its ability to operate in a complex landscape and integrate the disparate and formerly siloed systems. With the strength and flexibility of its fintech enablement platform, FintechOS was able to expose and extend the capabilities of the bank’s legacy systems, while also innovating digital solutions that helped to reshape and grow the bank’s diverse businesses.
Retail Banking
On the Retail Banking side, FintechOS overcame complexity and provided a straightforward way of onboarding new customers and originating new loans. Using the FintechOS platform, a new digital layer was built on top of the bank’s collection of discrete systems, enabling the creation of digital journeys that incorporated decisions, credit scoring, and other automated processes.
These systems can now be called up to serve different customer needs. For example, when a journey is started, a customer can enter their personal identification number, which is then checked against the main database sitting in the core. Customer risk is calculated, information is collected, and all this data is pushed to a third-party system that calculates the score and sends back a result to FintechOS. The entire journey orchestration is managed through the FintechOS platform, including digital services, like the analysis of documents, liveness detection, and video calling.
Merchant Banking
For Merchant Finance the FintechOS platform was used to launch a digital loan origination solution by a tight and inflexible (Black Friday) deadline. The innovative solution freed the bank’s merchant partners from paper-based loan applications at the point of sale.
FintechOS integrated with the bank’s legacy core system, enabling an end-to-end process. This meant that employee-assisted loan applications could be processed in a single digital session with an immediate approval decision. Customers no longer needed to file paperwork and wait for an answer. With automated credit decisioning, digital document generation and digital signatures, paper was finally obsolete.
While the loan origination journeys initially launched without an embedded offer for life insurance, thanks to the flexibility of the FintechOS platform a life insurance offering was later added with minimal disruption to the business. The low-code, no-code nature of the FintechOS platform enabled this without the need to rebuild processes.
Insurance
For Insurance the FintechOS platform was leveraged to build a complete end-to-end architecture for the company’s new home insurance product, which went live within 20 weeks. This included contract management, renewal management, and adjustments and restructuring for policy administration; proposal management and billing and collections for operations; and quote & bind journeys for both direct channels as well as the bancassurance channel for commercial. An agent and broker management module created a convenient way to manage commercial terms and conditions across partners.
The FintechOS platform enabled efficient integration of siloed systems and data, and created a single customer view on which the product and its associated customer journeys were built. FintechOS Accelerators were used to add on expected functionality quickly, while the low-code, no-code FintechOS Studio was used to create unique parts of the new offering in a fast and extensible way.
Results
To sustain growth in the face of disruptive threats from digital challengers, compliance and rising customer expectations, incumbent companies must overcome two challenges at the same time: innovating with new digital businesses while also upgrading and maintaining their existing general day to day operations. With FintechOS, the bank was able to achieve this, as well as measurable business results.
The Future
With FintechOS the multinational bank has the ability to perform continuous innovation, without any “rip-and-replace” of their existing systems, allowing the bank to be as nimble and innovative as their digital disruptors.
Today FintechOS technology powers all the bank’s retail banking services, including mortgages, credit cards, personal loans and loan origination, and will soon be used across the small business segment.
Merchants can now completely rely on the company as their partner for embedded financing, growing their business with minimal friction. The KYC component of the origination will be supported by face recognition, liveness technology, and where needed, video calls. The merchants that operate employee-assisted originations in store will soon receive access to fully digital loan originations.
The organization plans to extend its insurance offering by integrating advanced campaign management from the FintechOS platform. This will bring CRM and marketing automation functionality to the business, allowing the company to act directly on the customer data.
