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Author: shriya

Articles

What Is Composable Banking and Why Should I Care?

by David Offierski

Composable Banking is a technology and transformation approach that addresses the simple fact that change is constant. To ensure that banks and FI’s can innovate swiftly and maintain the greatest level of control over their product roadmap, they must adopt a modular or “swappable” architecture. The characteristics that define Composable banking follow the MACH principles: Microservices, API First, Cloud Native, Headless.

In a world that is evolving at an ever-increasing pace, it can seem as though the velocity of technology trends is starting to reflect the feverish pace of modern-day news cycles.  It can be hard to keep up with all that is happening across the financial services industry and a lot of the content out there is often decorated in painful consulting speak.  That is why we view it as our accountability to sift through the noise and develop an informed opinion on the what, why, and how of emerging trends that our clients and ecosystem partners need to know about.   

A significant shift is underway in terms of how banks and FI’s do transformation work reflecting similar (r)evolutions in other industries like eCommerce and tech platform players like Apple and Google. The term that is being increasingly adopted to encompass a broad cross-section of tech evolution amongst financial institutions is composable banking.  

Composable banking is a technology-enabled approach to delivering financial products and services to customers and ecosystem partners.  It is a banking transformation approach that addresses the simple fact that change is constant. To ensure that banks and FI’s can innovate swiftly and have an agile experience roadmap, they must own a modular “swappable” architecture. This is the only way to deploy new features rapidly and retain control of their destiny. 

Modular banking is not composable banking

First, let us define the characteristics of composable banking by delineating how it is different from the traditional, modular approach offered by E2E core banking systems provided by established SaaS vendors.  They have been using a modular approach to extend the functionality of their core systems, whereby their propriety modules are extensible but are neither flexible nor open.     

Composable banking is a solution approach that prioritizes integration readiness and flexibility, allowing organizations to dramatically improve the speed at which a company can onboard a new partner or design, build, test and deploy a new product.  This is relevant for value-driven business transformations aiming to build differentiating customer experiences while setting up a future-proof, flexible and cost-effective IT landscape.  

What you are Composed of matters 

Composable banking is enabled through the adoption of MACH characteristics to define how an organization approaches developing and supporting technology to enable new customer experiences and improve business operations.  

Microservices

M: Individual pieces of business functionality that are independently developed, deployed, and managed. 

With a microservices architecture, an application is built as independent components that run each application process as a service. 

These services communicate via a well-defined interface using lightweight APIs. Services are built for business capabilities and each service performs a single function. Because they are independently run, each service can be updated, deployed, and scaled to meet the demand for specific functions of an application.

Microservices Enabled Banking Example: 

 Monzo is a UK based neo-bank that has written extensively about their API-first approach and how they scale, secure, and manage over the over 2000 microservices that power their banking experiences. 

API First

A: All functionality is exposed through an API. 

API-first is a product-centric approach to developing APIs. It views the role of APIs as discrete products, rather than integrations subsumed within other systems. 

 Developing and managing microservices in an API-first approach means that APIs become key inputs to determine & define product functionality.  This means that the people developing against your API are your users, and your API needs to be designed with those users in mind. 

An API-first mindset requires adopting product management best practices to ensure the services evolve to meet the needs of users (developers), particularly around the characteristics of flexibility, interoperability and reusability.   

API-First Banking Example: 

Citibank is one such organization that follows an API-first approach in its path to digital transformation and empowers a developer ecosystem for innovation. Citi’s global consumer bank serves 62 million clients in 35 countries and uses APIs to build many of its consumer facing digital products. 

Cloud Native

C: SaaS that leverages the cloud, beyond storage and hosting, including elastic scaling and automatically updating.  

 Cloud-native technologies empower organizations to build and run scalable applications in modern, dynamic environments such as public, private, and hybrid clouds.  They feature containers, service meshes, microservices, immutable infrastructure, and declarative APIs to exemplify this approach. 

 Cloud-native banks leverage core banking systems built in the cloud and for the cloud to enjoy benefits such as scalability, flexibility, availability and elasticity, amongst others. 

Cloud Native Banking Example: 

 In September 2021, JP Morgan Chase announced that it would migrate its retail core banking assets to the Google Cloud Platform and leverage Thought Machine cloud native core banking system. 

Headless

H: Headless architecture enables an organization to evolve from a monolithic approach to service delivery to an ecosystem model.  

Front-end presentation is decoupled from back-end logic and channel, programming language, and is framework agnostic. 

Enables the ability to seamlessly embed secure banking services into a variety of customer touchpoints.   e.g., Apple Pay, ACH money transfers, budgeting and billing platforms.

Headless Architecture Banking Example: 

Using the API’s available through Temenos core banking platform, EQ Bank was able to act as a deposit-taking backend for Wealthsimple to launch high-interest savings account offering to WS clients in Canada. 

 

In the image below, we’ve highlighted some of the intended outcomes FI’s can expect to benefit from as they undertake the development of a digital transformation strategy and embark on a journey that can only be described as iterative and incremental. Spoiler alert: the work is never done.  The goal though is that with investment and dedication it goes faster and gets easier to measure.  

What is composable banking

“Almost half of the global financial services organizations are still in a very early or even immature stage of their digital transformation journey.”  

– Juergen Weiss, FI Practice Vice-President at Gartner 

Digital Transformation is the entire journey by which a financial institution seeks to digitize and automate its processes to improve its products and customer experiences and expand into newer, untapped markets with speed and greater operating efficiency.   

For those organizations that are still in the early stages of planning and prioritizing their transformation initiative, the breadth of choice, cost, and complexity can be daunting. Some of the activities required to achieve MACH characteristics require major infrastructure upgrades and the migration will most likely be implemented over a multi-year horizon.  

Status of core banking initiatives

A Composable Approach to Digital Transformation 

Developing a composable transformation approach should allow for multi-threaded initiatives that support the broader objectives. For this reason, we often work with clients to highlight one to two areas of opportunity, whereby organizations can see an immediate ROI in terms of CX and operational efficiency.   

Initiatives like implementing an intelligent document capture platform to reduce manual data entry into a Loan Origination Systems (LOS) or conducting an API Maturity assessment allow FI’s to realize immediate benefits while building transformation capability and creating foundational progress towards a future state that reflects the characteristics of composable banking.  

Curious about how you can develop a composable transformation approach at your organization? Book a workshop with Blanc Labs.

Articles

Top Use Cases of Intelligent Document Processing

Top use cases of intelligent document processing

Currently, most enterprises have a workflow rampant with manual document-heavy processing. 

However, businesses are quickly digitizing their document-processing workflows. 50% of B2B invoices across the globe will be processed without manual intervention according to a Gartner study. The reason? Manual document processing is more expensive than the cost of the documents themselves. 

For example, the average cost of processing a single invoice was $10.89 in 2021. Manual document processing is also prone to human errors like fat finger errors. In a world where 90% of the data is unstructured, you need a tool that can automatically convert unstructured data into structured data to supercharge your productivity. 

This guide explains how you can use intelligent document processing to save your business plenty of money, time, and resources. 

What is Intelligent Document Processing?

Intelligent Document Processing (IDP) is a technology that automatically extracts unstructured data from multiple document sources, including images, online forms, and PDFs. IDP is also known as Cognitive Document Processing (CDP). 

IDP converts this unstructured data into structured data using multiple technologies, including natural language processing (NLP), machine learning (ML), optical character recognition (OCR), and intelligent character recognition (ICR). Together, these technologies make IDP intelligent.

OCR is often used interchangeably with IDP. However, that’s not true. IDP uses OCR as one of the technologies to extract data. 

How Does Intelligent Document Processing Work? 

Here’s how a document is processed using IDP: 

  • Conversion: An IDP platform starts by capturing your document through a scanning device. Once it converts a physical document into a digital one, it starts ingesting data. 
  • Document image processing: The document’s image is processed for optimal OCR and archival. 
  • Reading text using OCR: OCR helps the machine accurately read the scanned document’s text. 
  • Identify language elements with NLP: IDP platforms use NLP to find language elements using methods like feature-based tagging and sentiment analysis. 
  • Machine learning algorithm classifies information: A combination of machine learning and other techniques is used to classify the information in the document. 
  • Extracting elements using AI: IDP uses AI to extract information elements like contact numbers, addresses, and names. 
  • Validation: IDP platforms validate information using third-party databases and lexicons for data validation. Data points are flagged when the platform can’t validate them so someone from the team can review them manually. 

Top Intelligent Data Processing Use Cases in Banking 

Reading and writing financial documents make up a large portion of a bank’s workflow. As a bank, you need to process data fast to offer best-in-class services to your customers without making errors. 

IDP helps banks guarantee accuracy and efficiency to their clients. In addition to data extraction’s key role in a bank’s workflow, banks can also use IDP platforms for fraud detection. 

Here are some of the most common use cases of IDP for banks. 

Mortgage Underwriting 

Customer satisfaction with mortgage originators reduced by five points on a 1,000-point scale in 2021 according to a study by J.D. Power driven by record mortgage origination volume. Banks need to automate their mortgage workflow to scale as the demand grows. After all, customer satisfaction is one of the most significant differentiators in the mortgage industry. 

The mortgage workflow involves collecting various documents. Extracting data from these documents is one of the major factors slowing down the workflow. This is where an IDP tool can help streamline your mortgage workflow. 

An IDP tool helps you speed up the underwriting process with automation. It automatically reads and extracts relevant data and relays it to your bank’s credit evaluation system. 

Claims Processing

The P&C Customer Satisfaction Survey reveals that the claim filing process is the biggest driver of customer satisfaction. 

However, the claims processing workflow can be complex. Claims data comes in various formats—customers might send data as word files, PDFs, and images. Plus, you might receive the data via multiple channels—you might receive it via email, chat, or over a call. 

Unifying this data without manual effort is a massive challenge. Traditionally, banks used OCR to process physical documents. However, the lack of accuracy required manual review. 

An IDP tool is a great alternative to OCR for claims processing. Thanks to technologies like NLP, computer vision, and deep learning, it provides greater accuracy than traditional OCR. 

Customer Onboarding 

Customer onboarding is one of the most resource-intensive processes for a bank. Banks spend an average of $280 to onboard a single client according to Backbase—the cost can add up when you’re onboarding hundreds or thousands of customers every month. 

Many of these expenses go towards processing documents, including the bank’s forms, credit reports, or tax returns. Sure, you can try automating this workflow. However, the automation will break down as soon as a new document type is introduced or you change your form’s template. 

An IDP tool can help tame your customer onboarding costs. Your customers will appreciate a fast onboarding experience, and you’ll save money, increase productivity, and make an excellent first impression. 

Financial Document Analysis 

Banks handle thousands of financial documents every day. From financial statements to tax returns, carefully studying financial documents is critical to a bank’s operations. 

Financial analysis is a cognitively heavy task. Why make your team spend time on mundane tasks like manipulating data when you can use an IDP tool to automate this process and enable your team to concentrate on their more complex deliverables. 

Using an IDP tool helps analysts automatically structure and populate relevant financial data into their system. You’ll do your analyst team a favor by eliminating a lot of their manual work, allowing them to focus on analysis. 

KYC Process Automation 

KYC (Know Your Customer), Re-KYC, and C-KYC are critical for compliance. Banks might need to refer to a customer’s KYC details at various stages during a customer’s journey. 

However, handling hand-written KYC forms is a hassle. Migrating a customer’s KYC data comes with challenges like human error and work overload. Committing errors when underwriting a mortgage or onboarding a customer costs money, but failing to comply with KYC requirements may increase the legal, compliance and regulatory risks.

Using IDP ensures accuracy, so you never have to lose your reputation and pay a fine for failing to comply with KYC norms.  The McKinsey KYC Benchmark Survey found that by increasing end-to-end KYC-process automation by 20%, an organization could enjoy the following positive outcomes: 

  • Increased quality assurance by 13% 
  • Improved customer experience (by reducing customer outreach frequency) by 18% 
  • Increased the number of cases processed per month by 48%

 

The Bottom Line 

Banks process a colossal amountnumber of documents and data each day. Getting new customer data into the system, processing claims, and analyzing financial statements are heavily data-driven tasks that involve dozens of documents from hundreds of customers. 

The probability of committing errors is high. Banks also need a large team just to process documents and structure the data in those documents. 

Banks need an IDP tool to automate this process and remove the risk of error from the process. It also integrates with applications to make migrating the data easier. An IDP tool also validates data and alerts team members in exception cases, when it requires a human to review accuracy. 

It is important to select an IDP tool that offers the right solutions for your industry. Better yet, find a partner who can create a custom IDP solution tailor-made for you. 

Why Choose Blanc Labs Intelligent Document Processing? 

Blanc Labs partners with financial organizations like banks, credit unions, and fintechs to automate operations. 

We can help you create robust automation solutions that minimize manual effort, reduce errors, and improve productivity. Our team helps you use the most advanced technologies including AI and ML to automate complex, resource-heavy processes like document processing. 

Book a discovery call with us if your financial organization deals with plenty of documents daily. We’ll come up with a tailor-made solution to minimize the friction in your document processing workflow. 

 

News

Innovation Is The Key To Digitally Transform Financial Services

Posted on 8 November 20228 November 2022

In a world where customers are becoming increasingly demanding, we need to find new ways of meeting their needs. The only way to do this is through innovation.

In this Business Ninjas podcast, our CEO, Hamid Akbari, talks about how Blanc Labs helps financial services organizations evolve their technology to meet new customer needs and make the most of market opportunities.

For more information on how Blanc Labs can help with digital transformation, get in touch.

 

 

Articles

Finding the right API Management Platform

APIs are an integral part of today’s digital world. They are used for secure data exchange, integration, and content syndication. As APIs become more ubiquitous in enterprise businesses, it becomes necessary to manage them efficiently.

Blanc Labs API management

Banking and Payments ecosystems are converging with Open Banking and Finance. Whether regulatory or market driven, these digital interactions are happening already – and growing exponentially. Doing APIs and API Management right are central to the growing interdependence and interoperability between Fintechs, Banks and Consumers. Stakeholders are demanding secure access to financial data to drive better customer experiences. A key enabler to that end are the systems that surround APIs.

What is API Lifecycle Management?

API Lifecycle Management is the process of building, controlling, distributing, analyzing, and reusing APIs. It also can include capabilities around intelligent discovery; one pane of glass visible across multiple API gateways and API management systems; bringing to life the visionary end state of monetizing and marketing all these capabilities to external parties to operationalize the concept of “API as a product”. Thus, there are many API Management solutions in the market offering a variety of features. But at the very minimum, an API Manager should allow users to do the following:

Discover APIs

Before you can more effectively govern their lifecycle, you need a simple and configurable tool to find, filter and tag all your API assets into a centralized repository. Simplify complexity and/or get better visibility and facts to position your organization to “open itself up” to the new business realities and opportunities emerging.


Design, build, and Test APIs


The API Management tool should provide everyone, from developers to partners, the ability to create APIs under a unified catalog and test their performance.


Deploy APIs


API Management tools should also allow you to publish APIs on-premises, on the cloud or in a hybrid environment. Additionally, the API Manager may give you a choice between managing the API infrastructure in the tool itself or on your own.


Secure APIs

By providing a central point of control, most API Management tools will ensure that you have full visibility of all your APIs across environments so you can mitigate any vulnerabilities.


Manage APIs


API Management tools should give you a central plane of visibility into APIs, events, and microservices. Most API management tools will allow you to govern APIs across all environments (on-premise, hybrid, cloud) and also allow you to integrate with other infrastructures, including AWS, Azure, and Mulesoft. A good API management tool should also provide multiple predefined policy filters to accelerate policy configuration.


Analyze APIs


An API Manager should give you real time metrics in a unified catalog. By providing data on the business performance or operations across your APIs, you can make better decisions leading to improved business results.


Extend and Reuse APIs


By giving you a single, unified catalog, an API Manager can eliminate duplication and extend the life of APIs through reuse.

The need for API Management

API management centralizes control of your API program—including analytics, access control, monetization, and developer workflows. It provides dependability, flexibility (to adapt to shifting needs), quality, and speed. To achieve these goals, an API Manager should, at the minimum, offer rate limits, access control, and usage policies. 

Essential features of an API Manager tool 

1. API Gateways 

 A gateway is the single entry point for all clients and is the most critical aspect of API management. An API gateway handles all the data routing requests and protocol translations between third-party providers (TPP) and the client. Gateways are equally important when securing API connections by deploying authentication and enforcement protocols.

2. Developer Portal 

 The primary use of the developer portal is to provide a hub, specifically for developers, to access and share API documentation. It is an essential part of streamlining communications between teams. Typically, developer portals are built on content management systems (CMS), allowing developers to explore, read, and test APIs. Other features of a developer portal could include chat forums for the internal and external developer community and FAQs. 

3. API Lifecycle Management 

 As the name suggests, API Lifecycle Management provides an end-to-end view of how to manage APIs. API Lifecycle Management is a means to create a secure ecosystem for building, deploying, testing and monetizing and marketing APIs. 

4. Analytics engine 

The analytics engine identifies usage patterns, analyzes historical data, and creates tests for API performance to detect integration issues and assist in troubleshooting. The information gathered by the analytics engine can be used by business owners and technology teams to optimize their API offerings and improve them over time. 

5. API monetization and marketing 

API management tools can provide a framework for pricing and packaging APIs for partners and developers. Monetizing APIs involves generating revenue and keeping the API operational for consumers. Through usage contracts, you can monetize the microservices behind APIs. An API management tool will offer templatized usage contracts based on predefined metrics, including the number of API calls. This empowers innovative external players to help drive your business in ways you have not dreamed up yet – and still do it securely. 

How successful is your API management?

Now that we know the features of an ideal API management software, how do you evaluate its success for your API efforts? Here are a few ways to track your progress:

Speed
How rapidly can you launch your APIs to meet your business goals? Latency and throughput are ways to measure the speed of deployment. Other areas to measure speed would be onboarding and upgrading APIs.


Flexibility
Flexibility is the breadth of options available to developers when adopting APIs. The greater the flexibility, the higher the cost and effort to manage the API.


Dependability
How available your APIs are to developers. One way to measure dependability is downtime. Quota is another way to restrict how many API calls can be made by a developer within a certain timeframe. Enforcing quotas makes API management more predictable and protects the API from abuse.


Quality
Stable APIs with consistent performance reflect higher quality. It is a way to measure a developer’s satisfaction with the API.


Cost
The above four factors contribute to cost. If your API management software provides a better view of all your APIs, it will reduce duplication and costs. Reuse of APIs is another way that you can save costs.

How are you managing API complexity?

If you are a business leader concerned about how to meet market demand through the creation and deployment of APIs, or you would like to monetize and reuse your existing APIs and reduce costs, then you need structured API management. 

In partnership with Axway, Blanc Labs offers a way to manage your APIs to bring maximum business value. Axway’s API Management Platform enables enterprises to manage and govern their APIs for developing and applying their digital services. 

Book a discovery call with Blanc Labs to learn more. 

News

thirdstream and Blanc Labs collaborating to bring intelligent document processing to financial institutions

Posted on 25 October 202225 October 2022

Document understanding and data extraction are keys to accelerating account opening and supporting underwriting of new retail and commercial accounts.

thirdstream, a leading provider of retail, commercial and credit card onboarding services, deployed with over 40 Canadian financial institutions, today announced a partnership with Blanc Labs, a trusted technology innovation partner to leading financial institutions. The collaboration injects Blanc Labs’ Intelligent Document Automation (IDA) onto thirdstream’s platform, extending existing services to include a proven solution that removes up to 80% of manual document reviews, thereby improving the customer and member experience.

“Our goal is to help our clients continually improve the experience for applicants and account holders. Our partnership with Blanc Labs leverages our Platform-as-a-Service, where our clients will be able to spin up the services Blanc Labs has already deployed with leading financial institutions, reducing the reliance on employee reviews of documentation,” said CEO Keith Ginter. “For those already using the thirdstream platform as part of their onboarding process, Blanc Labs’ Intelligent Document Automation (IDA) helps remove up to 80% of the manual document reviews and results in considerable improvement of the customer experience.”

Automated document understanding and data extraction are some of the keys to moving faster, especially when onboarding new commercial deposits and retail lending customers. thirdstream and Blanc Labs present a structured series of steps to deliver starting with the moment of customer engagement to data extraction using artificial intelligence  from each page of documentation. This eliminates the need for the manual entry of data, with complete and accurate data presented as part of the decisioning and account creation experience.

“Our services today address challenges across the financial ecosystem. Together with thirdstream, we’d like to offer faster time to value realization with our solution. Blanc Labs’ Intelligent Document Automation eliminates manual intervention and creates a compelling value proposition for banks, financial services, and insurance institutions. By increasing operational efficiencies, banks can focus on creating additional revenue streams and provide greater value for the end customer,” says Hamid Akbari, Blanc Labs’ CEO.

thirdstream and Blanc Labs help financial institutions deploy new products and services faster – a key consideration in today’s economy – as they build improved personalized services at scale. Our solution benefits financial institutions looking for pre-integrated innovative solutions that can de-risk and accelerate their modernization and digital transformation efforts.

About thirdstream

thirdstream is headquartered in Lethbridge, Alberta, providing digital account opening solutions, online and in-branch, to over forty Canadian banks, credit unions and trust companies. From identity verification to account funding, thirdstream’s solutions support consumer and business account opening, credit card onboarding, and unsecured retail lending, including adjudication. The thirdstream platform is cloud-deployed, designed for retail and business consumers seeking out financial institutions, and for financial institutions targeting consumers anywhere, any time, from any device. To learn more, visit www.thirdstream.ca.

About Blanc Labs

Blanc Labs is a preferred partner for enterprises looking to digitize and build the next generation of technology products and services. To help companies rapidly deliver on their digital initiatives, Blanc Labs has developed expertise and bespoke solutions in a wide variety of applications in financial services, healthcare, enterprise productivity, and customer experience. Headquartered in Toronto, Blanc Labs serves the Americas through operations in Toronto, New York, Bogota, and Buenos Aires. For more information on how Blanc Labs is building a better future, visit www.blanclabs.com.

Articles

Developing the next generation of talent at Blanc Labs’ Digital Academy

In August of this year, we launched the Digital Academy at Blanc Labs, where 100 students in Colombia had the opportunity to learn from our experts on topics that we consider key to our business.  

The students that joined the program as Associates, gained knowledge of fundamental concepts of agile methodologies, cloud computing, full-stack development, and RPA (Robotics Process Automation). 

The Digital Academy community recently shared their top takeaways from this experience.

Promoting a culture of learning at Blanc Labs

“Walking alone through the world of technology is not easy. I am sure many of us have encountered some barriers, such as not understanding what we hear in a video tutorial, or you end up having lots of questions. When we are reading the technical documentation, it may become even more complex. These situations make me appreciate my technology education teachers and the people who share their knowledge with me,” says Gustavo Camargo, a Software Engineering Associate, who is committed to achieving his dream of working in the IT industry. 

Martin Bec, who shared his experience as a Full-stack Developer in our latest bootcamp, says: “Teaching and sharing  knowledge is part of my lifelong learning way of living. I encourage others to clear up their doubts and I appreciate the opportunity to learn. My own learning approach significantly affects how I lead others to strengthen their career in IT.”

Working in technology requires a combination of technical skills and soft skills 

By being exposed to various virtual collaboration opportunities, students work on their communication, relationship-building, teamwork, and cultural awareness skills. One of their main challenges is to overcome the language barrier, identifying how to strengthen their learning in a second language in their spare time and the IT top skills they require for a booming professional career. 

“With agile methodologies, I learned that good planning is key, and I apply that thinking to my personal life. Fulfilling projects requires perseverance, coherence, and the team’s motivation to continue. There may be changes along the way, but the agile methodology is flexible with this, and you learn how to prioritize your work and focus on progress”, says Jennyfer Belalcazar, Systems Engineering Student. 

According to a Gartner study published in March 2022, an agile developer must master methods, techniques, behaviors, and various fundamental aspects of Engineering. 

  • Methods such as Scrum and Kanban, implementing Agile pilots, pivoting, and adjusting the strategy, and evaluating risks and results for the business, are highly valued
  • Understanding metrics, and User Stories are essential to promote feedback with stakeholders and gain in-depth knowledge to overcome project challenges 
  • Customer focus, continuous learning, and collaboration significantly impact interactions and work styles
  • The adoption of best practices, and the importance of test-first thinking, are fundamental for execution. The incorporation of agile architecture and the training of Database Administrators with a set of multidisciplinary skills impacts Agile teams’ performance

 

As complementary activities to their learning experience, Associates have created sessions to strengthen their conversational skills in English and they engage in activities to improve their personal brand and prepare for job interviews. 

As Associates evolve in their learning experience, they gain the most valued skills in this industry. Most students combine their Digital Academy experience with technical education, short courses, and other IT programs, particularly in development, programming, and Data Science.  

Building a culture of learning, fostering technology education, and empowering our team is fundamental to the success of our projects.Discover how Blanc Labs can bring an agile and strategic approach to your digital transformation project. Get in touch.  

 

Articles

How Canada’s largest independent brokerage used Blanc Labs’ expertise in Intelligent Document Processing to speed up their time to market

Canada’s largest independent online brokerage had an aggressive target date to launch and debut its residential mortgage product to originate loans through an in-house, proprietary Point of Sale (POS) software application. The POS solution needed to collect loan application data and documents from the borrower and co-borrowers.

The challenge was to buy or build the document automation layer of the solution in a short period of time.The online brokerage had limited internal resources to build the solution and needed a technology partner with experience in building digital lending products. The chosen partner needed to either bring its own intellectual property or build/integrate with required FinTech components.

Blanc Labs’ Expertise In the Canadian Mortgage Industry and Intelligent Document Processing

Ultimately, the online brokerage chose to leverage Blanc Labs’ expertise in the Canadian mortgage industry and intelligent document processing in order to collaborate on the design of a total solution and the development of its components.

Apart from achieving the technical and functional feature set defined for the online brokerage’s document automation, the project resulted in:

  • Accelerated time to market
  • Lower Cost of Ownership
  • Futureproof Technology Architecture
  • Better User Experience
  • Enterprise Level Document Management

Want to know how? Download the case study!

News

Blanc Labs CEO Hamid Akbari Speaks On What It Takes To Scale Up Successfully

Posted on 7 October 20227 October 2022

You don’t have to be a #Fortune500 company to start thinking strategically about the future of your business. Technology services firms that commit to strategic methods and sustainable growth mechanisms early on can experience exponential profitability.

The way forward is not always clear, but technology services firms can take it one step at a time. Hiring great people, adapting technological breakthroughs, and staying connected with the needs of their customers all contribute to success.

In this podcast hosted by Collective 54, our CEO, Hamid Akbari, talks about what it takes to scale up a company in today’s competitive landscape.

Curious to learn more about Blanc Labs? Get in touch.

News

Blanc Labs and Axway partner up to provide integrated open banking solutions for all

Posted on 5 October 2022

Axway (Euronext: AXW.PA), a leading provider of open banking built on the Amplify API management platform, is proud to announce its partnership with Blanc Labs, a trusted financial service and healthcare innovation partner.

While the largest banks are already well along their digital journey, many others are still tasked with competing in what can feel like an uneven playing field. Financial institutions must have a clear strategy for implementing, governing, monetizing, and marketing APIs to ensure a frictionless customer experience and better business results.

“We want to help all banks – anyone who has something to bring to the table – to strategize and compete in the open banking arena,” said Eyal Sivan, Head of Open Banking at Axway. “They will thrive as they embrace open APIs, build on trusted customer relationships, and meet their customers’ needs wherever they are.”

“At Blanc Labs, we help our clients achieve extraordinary results by accelerating their digital transformation journey,” says Blanc Labs CEO Hamid Akbari. “APIzation will enable secure data interoperability within the financial services ecosystem. Open banking and Banking-as-a-Service pose a disruption challenge as well as a massive growth opportunity for banks and fintechs.”

The specialized solutions offered by Blanc Labs together with Axway make API integrations more efficient and cost-effective thanks to universal API management. Benefits of the unified API platform include:

  1. Increased productivity as developers easily find and repurpose APIs, eliminating duplication of efforts
  2. Less technical complexity by unifying and simplifying API services across the organization
  3. Stronger security thanks to a unified, vendor-agnostic view of all APIs
  4. Faster legacy system upgrades through an API-first layer, which simplifies the addition of new services
  5. More robust governance through centralized documentation for multiple developer teams

“Partnering with Axway, a pioneer in API management and the open banking space, is a natural fit for us. Out-of-the-box support for open banking and common data standards will significantly reduce the cost of building next-gen financial services and will accelerate time-to-market for our clients,” Akbari adds.

As banks gain confidence with Axway and Blanc Labs open banking solutions, they can move from optimizing processes and keeping up with industry standards to unlocking new business models, discovering richer customer data insights, and building highly personalized services to delight their clients.

Learn more about the Axway-Blanc Labs partnership and how they can help banks fully participate in the growing open banking ecosystem, here.

About Blanc Labs

Blanc Labs is a preferred partner for enterprises looking to digitize and build the next generation of technology products and services. To help companies rapidly deliver on their digital initiatives, Blanc Labs has developed expertise and bespoke solutions in a wide variety of applications in  financial services, healthcare, enterprise productivity and customer experience. Headquartered in Toronto, Blanc Labs serves the Americas through operations in Toronto, New York, Bogota and Buenos Aires. For more information on how Blanc Labs is building a better future, visit www.blanclabs.com.

About Axway

Axway enables enterprises to securely open everything by integrating and moving data across a complex world of new and old technologies. Axway’s API-driven B2B integration and MFT software, refined over 20 years, complements Axway Amplify, an open API management platform that makes APIs easier to discover and reuse across multiple teams, vendors, and cloud environments. Axway has helped over 11,000 businesses unlock the full value of their existing digital ecosystems to create brilliant experiences, innovate new services, and reach new markets. Learn more at axway.com.

 

Articles

5 Factors to Evaluate Open Banking Readiness in Canada

By Steven Chung and Rishi Khanna

open banking readiness

Open banking’s first phase is almost upon us. Now more than ever, banks will need to address their digital and core systems if they wish to participate and gain from the new banking regime. The need for seamless digital experiences, especially post Covid, is shaping customers’ expectations from banks and financial institutions too. Roughly $416 billion is up for grabs and if the prediction holds true that open banking adoption will increase by 76% in the next three years, then incumbents should begin preparing themselves without delay.  

What is Open Banking?  

Open banking is a way for financial services customers to securely share their financial data with other financial institutions and third-party providers using APIs governed and regulated by universally accepted protocols. Open banking exists in several countries around the world including the UK, Australia, Brazil, and Singapore.  

The Benefits of Open Banking 

Open banking is pushing banks to innovate and play nice with Fintechs. In the UK, where open banking launched shortly before COVD-19, the use of Fintech applications for money management rose by 20% for adults and 50% for young adults. Banks, as trusted custodians of customers’ data, can take advantage of the new Fintech technologies that have sprung up as a result of open banking to deepen customer relationships and retain them by providing valuable insights on their personal or commercial finances instead of just facilitating transactions.  

5 Factors to Assess Open Banking Readiness in Canada 

The first phase of open banking in Canada will begin in January 2023. Many banks and credit unions are in the midst of preparing themselves for open banking. But just how ready are they? 

 Here are 5 Factors recommended by Blanc Labs to evaluate if you are ready for open banking: 

Factor 1: Your core and digital banking systems are up to date 

Your financial institution’s core and digital banking systems are scalable, compatible with other new technologies. You have web-banking and mobile banking platforms for retail and commercial customers. Most processes are automated, minimizing manual intervention. The core banking and digital channel systems are cloud-native.  

Factor 2: You have identified business use cases for open banking 

You have identified use cases for open banking at your institution and you would now like to invest in an API-led ecosystem to monetize your data. Open banking use cases could include Account Aggregation, BNPL (Buy Now Pay Later), and Tax preparation.  

Factor 3: Your organization is united in reaching its transformation goals 

You have a non-traditional approach to growth and view open banking as a strategic imperative towards creating new lines of revenue for your business. As such, you have budgets dedicated to open banking efforts. You are looking at ways to improve how to use your data through TPPs (third-party providers) to create relationships with other financial institutions and non-banking entities and turn them into new offerings for your customers.  

Factor 4: Your API-ecosystem is mature 

Your organization has been creating APIs for internal and external consumption for some years. There is a standardization and documentation around maintenance, governance, security, and management of APIs. There is visibility over the entire API catalogue and tooling to track and monitor API performance. You participate in agile data partnerships with Fintechs, which means your onboarding processes are thorough, but quick.  

Factor 5: You can operationalize APIs and use them as products 

That leads us to the final step. Your organization can support third-party use, both in terms of system bandwidth as well as security. Your systems can take high traffic load. You are primed to use API-as-a-Product.  

Do you have an Open Banking strategy? 

Still unsure? Apart from readying the underlying enabling technology considerations, Open Banking is fundamentally a business decision and a discussion about how to best compete and win in the new banking environment.  Here is a handy Digital Maturity Assessment from Axway that can help you figure out what stage you are at and what to do next. Blanc Labs in partnership with Axway offers an Open Banking Strategy Workshop that can help you: 

  1. Define your financial institution’s goals for growth 
  2. Analyze the current state of your organization and what you need to meet your long-term goals 
  3. Identify challenges that you need to beat to ensure you can take full advantage of open banking 
  4. Zone in on use cases that will give you the biggest ROIs and the fastest time to value 

Book an Open Banking Strategy Workshop with Blanc Labs to learn more.

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