HOW TO (RE)BUILD A BANK: CUSTOMER FOCUS After a white-knuckle ride of a year for the global economy, Greg Becker, president and CEO, of Silicon Valley Bank (SVB) Financial Group, must have been delighted – and perhaps a little surprised – to be able to announce, in July, that the Group had nearly doubled the size of its balance sheet over 2020/21 and added a record 1,700-plus new clients in the most recent quarter. He credited that increase to ‘consistent focus on client engagement and expanding the range of services we offer. These investments – in people, technology, and infrastructure – are directly supporting our growth and peer-leading profitability’. The importance of responding to client needs was a recurring theme in his earnings statement. And, after nearly 40 years of observing the behaviour of the entrepreneurs, enterprises and investors it supports, the ‘bank to the innovation economy’ has apparently become very good at it. Meanwhile, technology company Technisys, also had a notable year. With $50million of venture capital backing from Redwood Capital and five clients (with more in the pipeline) in North America, the company established an HQ in Miami in June and began adding to its teams across the Americas. To date, it has enabled banks and fintechs to elevate customer engagement for more than 100 million banking customers in 16 countries, including its birthplace of Argentina, with its next-gen digital and core banking platforms. Commenting on its move into the US at the time, the company said that
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Whether the old adage ‘the customer is always right’ is valid or not, the core issue for business has always been how to predict and respond to their changing needs. David McHenry from Silicon Valley Bank and Michael Haney at Technisys share their views what differentiated it from other existing large and very well-known platform operators there was its more flexible approach. It aims to help clients focus on their individual customers, working out not just what they are trying to do and enabling that, but understanding the motivation behind it – how they are feeling, what they’re likely to do next – and then helps clients respond appropriately. “Banks are no longer just transaction processing corporations, centred around the financial product itself,” says Michael Haney, who joined Technisys to lead its Digital Core business in North America last year. “It’s about providing insights into their customers’ financial health, providing actionable data that they can use to achieve their goals, meet their needs and, ultimately, improve their financial health. “So, banking becomes an enabler, rather than just something a person needs to do. We’re now assembling various deposit, lending and payment products into a capability that addresses a specific customer need, such as early pay/early wage access products, which are really taking hold.”
Technisys’ target companies are challengers, speedboat launches by legacy banks and non-financial services businesses that want to embed banking processes into their customer journeys. Its foundation product is its Cyberbank Core platform which, along with what it calls a digital engagement accelerator (Cyberbank Digital), gives banks access to a Cloud-native and API-centric, end-to-end digital architecture and third-party API marketplace that allows them to dynamically change and scale their products, based on customers’ behaviours and needs. Those behaviours and needs changed dramatically, of course, during 2020, and amplified calls to improve banking for the under- or unbanked segments of the US economy (people and business) using better data and innovative personal financial management (PFM) and business financial management (BFM) tools. Among Technisys’ first customers outside Latam was Rellevate, a neo bank concept built around earned wage access solutions, which is reaching out to the underbanked through employers. Technisys’ platform underpins Rellevate’s Pay Any-Day service, which was launched last year in the US. Targeted at the hourly waged, it works with employers to provide staff with access to money they’ve already earned without having to wait for their regular monthly payroll cheque. In this way it hopes to reduce reliance on traditional pay-day lenders with their sky-high interest and service charge fees.
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