If You Aren’t Thinking About Open Banking and APIs, You’re Late
Don’t risk attrition. Work with the fintechs, not against them.
Originally posted on CUNA, Jason Schwabline, Chief Strategy Officer, discusses the importance of open banking and APIs for a sustainable future. Read the original article here.
Your community feel and personalized services may not be enough anymore. Although still important to customers and members, they also want access to the “latest and greatest” banking offerings with streamlined approaches, forcing banks and credit unions to now compete with digital-only providers in addition to traditional institutions. These third-party fintechs have taken the market by storm, offering cutting-edge capabilities at low or no cost, increasing the risk of member attrition.
If you’re still maintaining multiple check processing or payment platforms across your institution, this siloed approach is likely hindering your ability to compete. Far gone are the days when each line of business operated in a silo — limiting integration potential both internally across various points of capture, and with external solution providers. With a lack of data transparency and fragmented strategy, business-critical information is restricted, and members struggle with disjointed user journeys and a lack of personalized experiences needed to build loyalty and trust.
It’s a pivotal time to shift your strategy toward an open banking methodology. Modern solutions streamline check processing workflows and enable true omnichannel approaches. And, as consumers grow increasingly comfortable with alternative payment capabilities, leveraging APIs to enable seamless access to these third-party solutions, rather than competing against them, is critical.
You may be asking yourself where to begin on this modernization journey. A payments refresh is often multifaceted as it extends across the credit union for maximum impact.
Upgrading your aging payments infrastructure and adopting a consolidated, single platform that powers all image acquisition channels is the first step. With tight integrations, best-in-class capabilities, and data transparency across all points of presentment, you’re putting the UX at the forefront and ensuring user journeys are transformed, yet consistent regardless of where they bank. Allowing customers and members to easily share access to bank account information and to tap into additional subsets of financial services also means you can provide new, hyper-personalized experiences that deepen engagement and strengthen institutional loyalty.
Alogent’s team of payment experts understand the significance and market need of refreshing these aging solutions. In fact, they saw a gap linked to the modernization of payment platforms and back-end infrastructure universally at financial institutions — and one that continues to become more pronounced as time passes. As solutions age, challenges grow in productivity and cost, and despite the decline of check volumes worldwide, the check remains a significant payment instrument that is not going away — prioritizing the need for a modernized approach that ensures sustainable success.
As a result, Unify was launched. With a cloud-based, open platform approach, Unify is patent-pending and the only solution of its kind that universally addresses all image acquisition channels within a financial institution. Its single external API and common set of code brings tangible savings internally. In addition to reducing overhead costs and the need for siloed, specialized IT teams, institutions gain quick access to transaction data, deploy products faster to address market needs, and enable tighter integrations to third-party solutions that keep users engaged. The magnitude of impact is felt across the entire institution once completed.
Open banking approaches have already become a significant part of your account holders’ banking routines, whether intentional or not. Forrester Research reports that 81% of survey respondents have linked their primary banking account to a fintech tool, confirming it’s time for financial institutions to embrace a modernized approach.
These updated strategies and refreshed solutions enable banks and credit unions to compete in today’s landscape, allowing account holders to bank when and how they want, but also ensuring the institution is positioned for the future with simplicity that maximizes scalability and flexibility through the cloud and open platform approach, as well as data consistency across all channels.
Don’t be held back by legacy solutions. Sustainable success requires continuous reinvention, adaptation, and a willingness to innovate — and the time is now.
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