FINASTRA: PLATFORMICATION Pulling together: Digitisation enables collaboration – and that’s good for all
Redefiningthe Redefiningthe futureof future offinance finance SMEs have long complained of being left in a financial services and funding wilderness by incumbents. The solutions that Finastra is offering those institutions via its innovative FusionFabric.cloud aims to bring those businesses in from the cold.
In fact, as Finastra’s Wissam Khoury puts it, the company is on a mission to change the world, one app at a time, with SMEs high on the company’s broader agenda to achieve financial inclusion for all. The Banking for Humanity strand at this year’s virtual Sibos explores just that – the role of the finance industry in everything from better access to bank accounts and loans, to lowering carbon footprints, digital adoption and diversity. Finastra’s contribution to solving some of those issues is to use platformification. Khoury, who is head of international at Finastra, believes banks’ previous reliance on building their own in-house solutions has been one of the main inhibitors to innovation, because building out on complex legacy systems is challenging and takes far too long. However, the new era of open banking provides a fresh opportunity for the collaboration essential to overcoming this.As well as fulfilling the needs of consumers, pulling together could fuel growth and new income streams. www.sibos.com
Collaborative fintech has a vital role to play in changing the world for the better, and Finastra can play a key role in helping to make that happen, says its Head of International, Wissam Khoury
FusionFabric.cloud is an open and collaborative development ecosystem designed to bring together banks and other financial institutions with analysts, fintechs, universities, consultants, developers and systems integrators, to find rapid-fire solutions to industry sticking points – and solve real-world problems along the way. Among its three core components, FusionCreator developer portal and application programming interface (API) catalogue enable users to access datasets, build applications and roll out solutions quickly – including REST API management, a sandbox environment and developer documentation. Its FusionOperate secure production environment, hosted on Microsoft Azure, allows users to connect their apps to Finastra software without building their own Cloud infrastructure, and includes monitoring tools and reliability, redundancy and security. The FusionStore app marketplace is where apps developed
within FusionFabric.cloud can be ‘monetised, promoted, discovered and consumed’ – including quality checking and validation, and marketing. It also provides access to extensive marketplace data to drive decision-making. Committed to increasing innovation speed, Finastra’s vision is to become the ‘number one platform for financial services’ by optimising cost of ownership; driving efficiency through open standards; accelerating growth through new and improved solutions; improving customer experience; offering ‘infinite’ innovation options through APIs, and investing in data curation and growth to fuel artificial intelligence (AI)-led developments, coupled with the breadth and scale of its developer network. Partners involved in FusionFabric.cloud are diverse. Finastra is also collaborating on a microfinance initiative in Kenya, bringing together fintechs, a UK university and wholesalers to provide better solutions for assessing SMEs’ creditworthiness, thereby lowering the estimated $19billion funding gap in the country. As Khoury puts it: “We’re redefining the future of finance. A key aspect is finance for good and improvements to financial services and literacy… helping our customers to create positive outcomes for millions of people, with the COVID-19 pandemic creating a fresh urgency.
FintechFinancePresents
2020 Special
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