Over the years, the digital banking trend has picked up so much pace that a bank’s digital infrastructure can make or break its business.
Today, with customer expectations at an all-time high when it comes to seamlessness and personalization, merely providing digital payments and online account services won’t suffice. Banks must stay close to their customers in important lifetime moments and daily activities.
Suffice to say, that traditional monolithic banking systems are under-equipped to bear the load of today’s customer expectations. For banks to thrive in this digital race, a transition to modern digital banking platforms is a must.
But with so many players out there, how do you choose a platform that fits your needs and budget the best?
Well, here’s an in-depth guide to choosing the right digital platform.
Things to Look for In a Digital Banking Solution
Selecting the right digital platform boils down to your budget, roadmap, strategy, and technical readiness. To that end, here are some factors to consider before you finalize a digital solution.
1. Easy Integration
A digital banking platform should effortlessly integrate with your current and future core banking technologies, and not become another legacy technology in your IT stack.
Look for platforms that come with robust integration frameworks, as these enable channel, process, and system integrations, unifying customer data, enabling central monitoring, allowing for IT asset reusability, and most importantly, facilitating business continuity.
2. Open Banking and Open Finance Architecture
The question of open banking is no longer an ‘if’ but a question of ‘when.’ When choosing a digital banking platform, take into account the vendor’s open banking and open finance strategy.
Specifically, look for a platform that is ready to leverage API functionalities, including API management, API gateway, customer authentication, developer portal, consent management, and more.
On top of that, the platform should also seamlessly integrate with ecosystem partners as well as other banks, allowing you to provide more value-added services to your customers. This includes personal finance management, account aggregation, or remittances. Non-financial services like reward points, flight bookings, and event tickets can also be a part of this bundle.
3. Vendor Track Record and Support
Lastly, you must consider the reputation, track record, and after-sales service of the digital banking platform vendor. Yes, system functionality is important. But you must also factor in how the vendor’s offerings tie into your culture and innovation strategy.
Look for vendors that demonstrate knowledge of market trends, share a culture similar to yours, and have a detailed roadmap. Moreover, assessing vendor track records involves reviewing references from other bankers and customers, quality of customer interactions, and overall industry reputation.
Support during implementation is also one of the key factors that separates good vendors from great ones. And so is responsive and personalized customer service.
4. Microservice-Ready Functionalities
For a bank, the quality of being customer-first is rooted in its technology stack, specifically in its ability to roll out customer-centric functionalities.
Microservices-based architecture can provide such readiness, flexibility, and scalability to a bank’s digital infrastructure. It allows for continuous delivery of new and updated software applications, irrespective of the complexity or size of the project.
Microservices also enable them to quickly revamp and innovate their tech stack, which paves the way for seamless horizontal and vertical integration.
5. Omni-channel Customer Experience
Omnichannel customer experiences don’t necessarily mean providing banking access across multiple channels. It means providing a consistent experience regardless of where the customer interaction begins.
Create once, distribute everywhere – an omnichannel platform allows customer interactions to be orchestrated in a centralized manner. In essence, the digital banking solution acts as a central hub through which all customer data flows.
6. Reliability, Stability, and Security
Given the critical nature of banking, your digital banking platform should be able to handle high transaction volumes, maintain uninterrupted service, and process customer requests effectively. If there are any issues with the services, they should be resolved in the least time possible.
Since you’re handling sensitive customer data, you need a platform that employs stringent data encryption, compliance, backup, access controls, and audit trails. Choose a solution that features the latest security protocols and is equipped with state-of-the-art monitoring capabilities, and business continuity features.
7. Buy, adapt and build
Lastly since innovation is continuous in nature, if your digital banking platform allows you to adapt or build the base digital banking platform you bought, it will help with progressive transformation. Modern digital banking platforms allow banks to adapt or build everything from UI/UX to custom Microservices, security protocols, rules and more. Further a low code approach to adapt or build can significantly reduce load on your IT teams and accelerate innovation.
Wrapping Up
Now that you know what to look for in a digital banking solution, you can start shopping around. Consider all of your requirements and objectives as well as the capabilities of your existing tech stack before finalizing an option. Once you find what you’re looking for, spend time researching each option in depth.
Or, you could save yourself a lot of time by opting for iGCB’s Digital Banking Platform – a state-of-the-art, AI-driven, cloud-native, and API-enabled digital banking solution. Powered by iGCB’s revolutionary eMACH.ai, you can provide a contextual and personalized banking experience to your customers and create signature banking in line with their evolving needs.
Learn more about Digital Banking on our website.
