Create vs collaborate: how to integrate apps in your digital service

In the race for digital transformation, financial institutions looking to move beyond legacy technology are faced with a choice. They can choose to build their own solutions, buy from established vendors or connect solutions to evolve their customer experience and meet customers' changing needs.

To manage the transition effectively, institutions can speed up this process by focusing on core ownership areas to build and maintain combined with best-in-class solutions to cover areas where they have less core expertise or customer urgency.

Protecting core value

As financial services become more fragmented and account holders become more comfortable with using multiple financial platforms, institutions must focus on guarding and maintaining their core user value.

For community banks and credit unions, all value rests on protecting customer relationships. Core systems should therefore focus on protecting the reasons account holders work with you in the first place - security of their funds, convenience in accessing them and expertise in how to manage and grow capital.

However, modern service levels have to go beyond this, built on using accurate data to track, manage and improve those relationships. This is where apps and partnerships become essential, as evidenced by the growing number of institutions collaborating with fintechs.

Investing in relationships

While it is essential for financial institutions to own account holder relationships, fintech collaboration can help maintain and grow these by reducing friction and enhancing end-user value.
By connecting modern apps to core systems, financial institutions can instantly create more valuable, user-centric experiences that make their service more attractive, durable and competitive in the rapidly changing financial ecosystem.

This can be the case for internal as well and external processes. Finastra’s FusionFabric.cloud app ecosystem has already seen a range of apps created that target key issues facing financial institutions.

These include apps that enable your team to collect, display and analyze user data to provide the best experience possible, or even help couples share financial data to make better long term decisions.

Creating connected user value

In this model of app-enabled services, it is still the institution that creates core user value. Connected apps serve to accelerate and scale that value for account holders. The fastest way to implement these solutions is via open-API connections.

With instant connections, institutions can take a low-risk approach to digital transformation, at the same time as creating more personalized services that suit their audience’s expectations, drive improved retention and user acquisition.

FusionFabric.cloud platform is designed to unlock innovation in financial services at scale. The platform includes pre-built APIs that connect your business to fully vetted and approved fintech apps that can transform your service and help you build long term value.