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  • Writer's pictureYusra

The best digital banking platforms and software 2021


It's a tough market out there; the introduction of Fintech has shaken up the financial service sector. The need to remain competitive and ahead of the game is more important than ever before. With new entrants into the marketplace, opportunities abound but are not always easy to grasp. In order to maintain your status quo, Banks and Financial Institutions must evolve infrastructure, products and services you must look for ways to innovate and develop in an environment that can be technologically challenging.


There is a new generation out there ready to embrace the world around them with its inherent flaws, bring onboard their ideas of how things should work better and make it happen. It's an exciting time to be in banking and a challenging one. As banks seek to evolve their products, services, and technologies there is no better time than now for them to benchmark themselves against the competition. Reviewing vendors capabilities, strengths, weaknesses and overall suitability should be the core focus of any bank looking to make a change today.


Points to consider when selecting a digital banking platform

 

Digital banking means a lot of things to a lot of people, but the aim is simple: convenience and choice for customers, whatever their financial needs.


Choosing the right digital banking platform is a significant decision, given that you'll potentially be locked into it for years. It's worth putting in the effort to make an informed choice. Here are some things to consider:


On-boarding Time and Cost

Time is money – A slow on-board ramp up leads to future expenses, such as delayed customer acquisition, and lost revenue due to poor customer experience. The cost of onboarding depends on the scope of your project and the complexity of your on-boarding requirements.


Operational Responsibility for End User Experience

You're responsible for the security, availability, performance and quality of service for the digital platform you select.


Technology Platform and Vendor Complexity

Data security involves a lot more than encryption. If your vendor cannot secure all data flows, you will need to place controls on every data flow. The platform should also allow you to scale operations in real-time. These capabilities can be an indicator of the technology complexity for both the banking system and third-party vendor and the risks it could entail.


Scalability of Bank's IT Capabilities

When choosing a digital banking platform, evaluate how well the bank can scale up their systems support structure when necessary, as this is vital to operational efficiency. The larger and more complex your project is, the greater impact potential mistakes will have on your business and your customers.


Digital Experience of the Bank's Employees

The digital platform vendor may be only part of the system used by the bank to provide a seamless customer experience. Ensuring that you have enough control over internal processes can help ensure the smooth delivery of information between your systems and those operated by third parties, such as vendors or outsourcing partners.


Pricing and Fees

Make sure that you understand any pricing incentives or discounts, how your contract will be renewed and termination options before signing a contract. It's worth pointing out that reducing costs should not undermine the quality of your banking service. The right platform can deliver cost-effective solutions while also improving customer experience, reducing costs, and improving profitability.


Currency Flexibility

You should be able to use your digital banking platform with any currency. If the customer is in a different country than your business' location, you may need to deal with multiple currencies simultaneously. It's important that your digital banking platform allows for variance of exchange rates without having an adverse impact on the transactional process.


Settlement of Funds & Risk Management

Review vendor settlement policy and risk management information to determine the options available when settling funds with third parties. Certainly double-check that your bank can optimize its settlement processes for business use, as this will help ensure a smooth flow of revenue without compromising the security of funds.


Interoperability with Legacy Systems

You may want to integrate your new digital banking platform with existing systems. Make sure that the system you choose will allow for an easy and efficient integration into these legacy systems. This helps ensure scalability in the future, as you can operate multiple platforms in parallel while maintaining a single source of truth.


Auditing, Reporting and Payment Calendar

Digital banking platforms can be integrated with a comprehensive suite of reports, allowing you to stay informed about your business at all times. The system should also allow for seamless reporting capabilities. Best practice is showing what happened in the past that will help create interesting insights for the future. Also make sure that the system is able to manage the required payment and revenue calendars.


Agent and Sub-Broker Payments

Depending on your business model, you may need to pay agents or sub-brokers in each country where you operate. Make sure that your digital banking platform offers an integrated agent hub and allows for easy identification of sub-brokers and the creation of separate bank accounts for each one. This helps ensure the smooth flow of financial information without major disruptions when paying third parties on behalf of customers.


Integration with other Customer-Facing Systems

To deliver a seamless digital banking experience, your system should be able to work in harmony with all your customer-facing systems such as mobile apps or front-end websites. The system should also be able to integrate with other back-office systems, providing a single source of information for the business users and allowing access to all the relevant data from a central location.


Governance and Security Compliance

Make sure that you talk about governance during the selection process, as this will help you ensure that the system is meeting your requirements and expectations. Governance covers privacy, procedures, roles and responsibilities of all of your business users.

The solution should also comply with industry security standards such as ISO 27001/2, PCI-DSS Level 1 or SEPA (Single Euro Payments Area) regulations. This will help ensure that your financial information is safe and that you're meeting all regulatory requirements.


Service Level Agreements (SLAs)

During the selection process, make sure to check whether your vendor offers any service level agreements (SLA), especially for 24/7 availability of support. SLAs can help you ensure high-quality customer support as well as optimized delivery of your business' service and products to customers.


Integration with Payment Terminals and Mobile Apps

Digital banking platforms can be integrated with payment terminals, allowing for a smooth transactional process. Digital banking also offers the possibility of integrating mobile apps, which combined with other digital channels, enables banks to provide users with an omnichannel experience.




Banks must look at evolving or be ready to face extinction.

 



The global banking software market is expected to reach $20 billion by 2023, growing at a Compound Annual Growth Rate (CAGR) of 6.85% from 2017-2023. Factors such as the increasing use of mobile apps in retail banking, rising demand for online payments, and more technologically advanced payment gateways are expected to drive the growth of this market.


Here we have listed the Digital Banking Software 2021: Top players in Digital Banking Software Market are Finacle, Arttha - Unified Fintech Platform, TCS BaNCS, Temenos Infinity, nCINO, Bankingly, Oracle Banking Digital Experience, FIS Core Banking, Fusion Essence Digital, and BankingOn.



The Best digital banking platforms 2021 are:


Finacle is the industry-leading digital banking solution suite from EdgeVerve Systems, a wholly-owned product subsidiary of Infosys. Finacle helps traditional and emerging financial institutions drive truly digital transformation to achieve frictionless customer experiences, larger ecosystem play, insights-driven interactions, and ubiquitous automation. Today, banks in over 100 countries rely on Finacle to service more than a billion consumers and 1.3 billion accounts. Finacle digital engagement suite is a modern omnichannel solution that supports banks to onboard > sell > service > engage - retail, small business, and corporate customers.


The Finacle digit engagement suite offers a vast range of traditional, contemporary, and new channel experiences to every type of user-end customer, bank staff, external partner, and trusted third party. At the same time, the core promise of the Finacle digital engagement is to stimulate banks to ride deeper customer engagements, openness and agility for innovation-led development, and digital operational excellence.


Arttha is an award-winning fintech platform by PureSoftware that enables banks and financial institutions to drive revenue with powerful value propositions. Arttha's digital banking solutions are: digital banking, digital wallets and payments, loan life cycle management, merchant management, and agent banking. Arttha aims to empower banks to provide highly differentiated virtual banking experience to their customers. Arttha has a huge partner ecosystem to enable its customers globally. It also strengthens your digital relationship by building tightly integrated digital touchpoints and driving deeper consumer engagements. Arttha platform offers you to upgrade your bank to serve effectively, continuously delight, and digitally engage the customers with trustful, flexible, and future-proof digital banking.




The TCS BaNCS universal financial solution is designed to help financial services institutions enhance end-customer experience. It is specially designed to help financial services institutions and enhance the end customer experience. In addition, it empowers them to embrace open and innovative technologies that manifest customer engagement.

TCS BaNCS solutions include:


  • Online account opening

  • Digital banking

  • Core processing

  • AML and KYC compliance

  • Flexible deployment methods - cloud hosting or on-premise


Temenos AG is a company specializing in enterprise software for banks and financial services, with its headquarters in Geneva, Switzerland. Temenos infinity is a digital marketing platform that accelerates digital transformation initiatives with high-class front and middle office transactional capabilities to reimagine customer engagement by creating consistent, seamless, and human experiences. With Temenos, you get a fast market with an extensive repository of pre-built features and develop rapidly to serve the customers. In addition, it Creates frictionless, personalized, and human banking experiences for customer satisfaction.


nCino is built as a single, multi-tenant SaaS platform, completely transforming the financial institutions and their way of operating. It offers:

  • Onboarding

  • Analytics

  • Loan origination

  • Deposit account opening applications

  • Streamlining employee

  • Client and third party interactions

  • Efficiency

  • Transformation


Bankingly digital platform has outshined other digital banking platforms for being future proof. This is because they have taken proper steps to interact with customers actively. Offering 24/7 online services, it has provided access to the customers for multiple services:

  • It lets the customers easily access the products online from any computer or tablet.

  • It allows the customers to carry out online transactions whenever they want.

  • The companies are also entitled to perform the operations they need through our web channel for business accounts.

Furthermore, it offers several essential benefits that make its services worth taking:

  • Top security

It Offers its customers secure digital banking channels, and its solution also abides by the Best Safe Programming Practices OWASPTop 10.

  • Future proof

The Banking subscription model is designed to cover all the updates, enhancements, and the continued development of the digital banking platform. As a result, the customers don't have to pay again for every upgrade or enhancement.

  • Short Time to Market

Bankingly offers faster solutions than any other and can be implemented in 2-3 months. It has proved to be an excellent quick win to make your customers happy and satisfied.


Oracle banking digital provides the best banking solution that can integrate with any core processor and service of all lines of business. In addition, it works with a risk-mitigated approach that allows the banks to add on and enhance components selectively.

Some salient features of the banking platform are as follows:-

  • Modern age user experience for digital channels built on industry-standard open technologies

  • Out-of-the-box mobile apps

  • Multi-entity, multi-lingual, multi-user by design

  • Highly componentized API-first architecture

  • Extensible and highly upgrade-proof

  • Secure multi-factor authentication


FIS has gained over 50 years of fintech experience. This Modern Banking Platform is cloud-enabled, open, and secure. In addition, it offers a modernization solution designed with API-first functionality that puts you in control.

Some of its highlighted features solutions are:

  • FIS clear edge

It is a very easy and transparent solution for financial institutions. In addition, it simplifies the process of contracting, pricing and implementation.

  • Flexible

It Lowers your costs, reduces the IT burden, manages regulatory demands, and easily launches new products. It is indeed an all-in-one flexible real-time digital core banking platform that provides a better experience to the customers.


Finastra’s Fusion Essence has responded to all the market challenges with a unique ecosystem approach and partnering with Microsoft Azure for cloud enablement.

To make the understanding more precise, some of the prominent advantages are listed below:

  • Optimizes the process of reducing TCO and risk.

  • Achieves quick time to market

  • Ensures ongoing Innovation with a banking platform that would allow the users to extend partnerships and build your ecosystem

  • Available as an on-premise, hybrid, and full cloud solution.

  • It uses powerful analytics to help the customers.


BankingOn is the best platform that simplifies online transactions and provides every service that a physical bank shall. It enables its customers to develop such a banking platform that can help clients complete payments even more fluidly and anywhere.

Pros of using BankingOn Mobile Banking Platform:-

  • BankingOn allows the clients to launch and insert various kinds of improvements or modifications to our mobile application of the banking system in just a few seconds.

  • It offers an excellent alert and report system, which can notify the user of the exact moment when a user has a problem with our banking system.


Conclusion


The digital banks mentioned earlier are some of the best digital banking platforms that you must check out as they provide the best services and increase customer satisfaction. This article has put all the detailed information necessary for a Bank to make an efficient choice. However, you can also check out their official websites to know more about their services and reviews before entirely relying on the particular platform. Hopefully, the article was valuable and informational to you. If you have skipped out on any of the digital banking platforms, go back and check it out all again.


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