It ’ s moves like these that empower customers , Soper says , and gives them the keys to their own innovation roadmap . “ We ’ ve moved on from a world where banks own every product or innovation . And as we move towards Banking as a Service and embedded finance , Open Finance will only become increasingly important .”
Customer services and digital transformation The way customers engage today compared to ten years ago has been transformed , and digital is at the heart of it all . From neobanks , super-apps and hyper personalization to wholesale offerings as-a-Service , the technology underpinning this new world needs to be fast , secure , efficient and highly scalable , says Soper .
Additionally , COVID has sped up digital adoption in multiple ways . Some analysts say cloud adoption was brought forward by five to seven years . Mobility and cloud became increasingly important as people needed accessible Financial Services in a remote world , he points out .
“ As an example , when bank branches were closed , people needed to find alternate ways to send money or pay bills . Managing on-premise technical infrastructure also became increasingly challenging during travel bans . Cloud meant you could achieve this from anywhere , whether it was provisioning new capacity , upgrades or deployments .”
Indeed , Finastra ’ s own operations have shifted significantly , he explains , “ We ’ ve moved many of our products to the cloud , improving agility . The pandemic forced us to
116 January 2022