This article was originally published in the Summer 2018 issue of The Record. 

What do the world’s most disruptive banks have in common? They have platform at the heart of their strategy. Accelerating pace of technology evolution and regulatory challenges require banks to be receptive to change through agility and ­collaboration – and that is precisely what platform delivers.

At the heart of every great platform is an integration layer, which connects a bank’s entire IT landscape and functional capabilities using open application programming interfaces (APIs) to let processes run through software components in real-time. Using open APIs means following industry standards on connectivity with no custom knowledge – which is basically speaking the same language as innovative fintechs and the entire digital economy. Coupling this with a low-code environment for development and integration based on graphical tools and libraries of pre-built ­well-documented objects and open APIs, will provide best time-to-market and agility.

What truly defines the quality of the platform, however, is the variety of pre-integrated applications. Platform provides access to the ecosystem of innovation and makes it easy to consume. With various parties – including banks themselves, fintechs, non-financial players, systems integrators and universities – developing applications on the platform, it broadens banks’ options in terms of business strategies, target audiences, product features and customer service. The ability to run these applications instantly in the cloud is crucial – banking capabilities should be as easy to install and run as consumer apps on smartphones.

Finastra’s FusionFabric.cloud platform is changing the way applications are developed, deployed and consumed in financial services. According to Martin Haering, our chief marketing officer, it “allows banks to innovate at an incredible pace and enables fintechs to collaborate with banks like never before. We provide them with the right platform and tools to be successful.”

Building the bank around a platform is undoubtedly the only approach to manage, run and scale the bank’s participation in the world of open banking and the new digital economy – platform is the new standard and a pre-requisite of success. Most banks are still in the beginning of their journey to the platform, but adoption should no longer be difficult as all new capabilities can be delivered instantly in the cloud.

Andrei Charniauski is in the Product Strategy and Market Intelligence team at Finastra

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