Category: Partners

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

Partners | Leadership | STEM | Talent

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

October 19, 2022

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.

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

Financial Services | API Management | IT Management | Open Banking

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

October 5, 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:

Increased productivity as developers easily find and repurpose APIs, eliminating duplication of efforts
Less technical complexity by unifying and simplifying API services across the organization
Stronger security thanks to a unified, vendor-agnostic view of all APIs
Faster legacy system upgrades through an API-first layer, which simplifies the addition of new services
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.

Transforming a Bank’s Value Network with Automation

Transforming a Bank’s Value Network with Automation

August 11, 2022

Michael Porter’s value chain has been one of the top seminal business management ideas that saw business operations with through a new lens. Just like the value chain resulted in concepts like value creation and value pricing leading to phenomenal growth in global business scale and operations in the last 50 years, we are now seeing a similar scenario in the financial services industry with intelligent automation.

At the turn of the century, we saw a new concept emerge that resulted in changing the business dynamics in the Y2K. This new business concept came to be known as value network, a series of interactions between individuals, entities, organizations, departments, and systems that collectively work towards benefitting the entire group or ecosystem. This new concept had an astounding impact on how businesses and markets operated and paved the course of today’s business ecosystem. For instance, the rise of Apple and its ecosystem can be attributed to this shift.

A similar shift is also taking place in the financial services industry, where the digitization, embedment, and now decentralization of the payments ecosystem with the commercialization of blockchain, cryptocurrencies, procure to pay (P2P) lending are being touted as the next big thing.

Given the pervasive technical and innovative initiatives that are emerging at breakneck speed, it is a necessity necessary to keep transforming and innovating. This is especially relevant for the financial services industry which have millennials as customers and will soon begin catering to GenZ.

To digitally transform a bank’s value network let’s start by stating the three core areas of a bank’s value network namely, network promotion & contract management, service provisioning & billing, and platform operations.

With a two-sided value network, the bank fundamentally connects a borrower with a depositor and thus, becomes the enabler of value creation for such a network. In doing so, a bank delivers core banking and back-office operations, payments and lending functions, and risk and treasury management activities.

For each of these areas, hundreds of functions and duties must be seamlessly executed with precision. Today, the increase in business volumes and scale of operations has led to bankers asking, “What if these complex and time-consuming operations can be boosted with robots (bots) assisting humans to accelerate speed, increase productivity, and assure the precision of key banking functions?”

Some of the key operational areas where bots can and, in many cases, are assisting humans to realize the true potential of an enterprise are customer service, compliance accounts payable, credit card processing, mortgage processing, fraud detection, know your customer (KYC) process, general ledger, report automation and account closure process.

By embracing bots, banks can improve the customer experience while reducing costs and improving efficiency. Increased automation combined with more efficient processes makes the day-to-day easier for teams and individual contributors as they will spend less time on tedious manual work, and more time on profitable projects. Let humans contribute to high-value innovation, and robots help in maintaining and running operations to ensure an efficient and effective enterprise. To realize the true value of bots, and for a bank to embark on its digital transformation journey, the right approach, executive sponsor, business alignment, process discovery & design, pilot, roadmap, and a center of excellence (CoE) is essential to succeed. By using tactics such as data alignment, problem framing, road mapping, and piloting new robots, a bank will be well poised to reach its automation goals.

Blanc Labs has deep industry knowledge and proven experience working with leading banks to gain efficiencies through intelligent automation solutions. We take a holistic approach, helping financial services companies build the necessary foundation and setting them up for long-term success.

Book a consultation with Blanc Labs to discover the impact of our Intelligent Automation solution.

Open Banking API Challenges: 4 Areas That Need Intervention

Financial Services | API Management | IT Management | Open Banking

Open Banking API Challenges: 4 Areas That Need Intervention

June 29, 2022

By Steven Chung and Bob Paajanen

As financial institutions find their way into the digital world, they face competition from several non-bank forces, including FinTechs and Big Tech companies like Apple, Google, and Amazon. FinTechs and Big Tech have begun rewriting the rules for the finance industry creating new ways of banking and new revenue streams. By offering speed, innovation, and unbundled financial services, digital non-banking entities are luring away customers from banks and credit unions. Open banking promises financial institutions an entry into the changing banking ecosystem by tapping into third-party application programming interfaces (APIs). But without the right strategy, banks may find themselves saddled with high costs, low time to value, vulnerable data systems, and no ROI to show.

API Challenges

As API adoption grows, so does the concern around how these APIs will be built or bought; how they will be managed; and the security and privacy risks that they present.

API Standardization and Documentation

The biggest concern around API adoption is standardization with more than 52% of organizations finding it a challenge. Unfortunately, there is no universal identity management framework which means that companies must rely on their developers to build their own management systems. Without proper documentation or style guides, different teams of developers within the organization may come up with varying standards for how the APIs are built and consumed, leading to issues with integration and management. The ‘State of Software Quality: API 2021’ study by SmartBear found that 54% of respondents pegged “accurate and detailed documentation” as the second most important characteristic they needed in an API as an API consumer, ease of use being the topmost. Yet, close to 40% of the respondents did not use API management software or were using an in-house API management tool.

API Security

As banks use more APIs to enable digital businesses and provide web and mobile experiences to customers, the chances of security breaches also go up. There have been several incidents of API attacks and data leaks this year alone. API security is made worse by the fact that many organizations lack an inventory of the APIs they create or use from third parties. Research firm Gartner found that the common theme among many of the API breaches was that “the breached organization didn’t know about their unsecured API until it was too late.” Sadly, there is no tool that will automatically discover vulnerabilities in the APIs. Implementing API threat protection and access control will require endpoint security (processes, infrastructure, and protocols). Without an API management platform in place, this will present further challenges.

“By 2022, API abuses will move from an infrequent to the most-frequent attack vector, resulting in data breaches for enterprise web applications.”
Gartner (2021)

API Governance standards and privacy regulations

Government-dictated compliance frameworks around APIs are still some time away for Canadian financial institutions. This means that developers at banks and credit unions must rely on varying standards, including security standards, when it comes to how API integrations will work and be used. Without governance standards, financial institutions run the risk of exposing themselves to fraudulent third parties and exposing customer information in ways that could be used against their interests.

API Reliability & Performance

To support new functionalities and user experiences, developers in financial institutions are relying more and more on third-party APIs, APIs from business partners, and from other business units within the enterprise. Many of these APIs are licensed from providers that also look after their daily operations. Due to the composite nature of these applications, an outage with one third-party API can impact any application that is using that API. As of April 2022, there were close to 7.8 million failed API calls in the UK according to Open Banking Implementation Entity (OBIE). The financial entities with the most failed calls are the big banks including Barclays, Lloyds, and HSBC. Frequent API errors create a negative impact on customer experience and may lead to discontinued product use.

Is your bank ready to adopt open banking?

API integrations are a necessity as we move towards an open banking system. Financial institutions must have a clear strategy on how they want to implement, govern, monetize, and market APIs to ensure a frictionless customer experience and better business results.

Blanc Labs has partnered with Axway to provide specialized solutions that make API integrations and management more efficient and cost-effective. Benefits of our unified API platform include:

Increased productivity, as developers are easily able to find and repurpose APIs instead of duplicating efforts or wasting time searching for them.
Less technical complexity by unifying and simplifying API services across the organization
Better security through a unified view of all APIs
Faster upgrades of legacy systems through an API-first layer allowing you to add new services more easily
More robust governance through centralized documentation that multiple teams of developers can reference

Book a demo or discovery session with Blanc Labs to learn about the impact of our API solutions for banking.

Are your APIs causing more pain points instead of solving them?

Financial Services | API Management | IT Management | Open Banking

Are your APIs causing more pain points instead of solving them?

June 22, 2022

Now, more than ever, banks are looking at ways to modernize their core technology to meet customer demands for speed, personalization, and seamless digital experiences. For the banks, a large part of that involves securely exposing customer data to third-party systems and consuming data from them. A simple example of this is using your bank credit card to pay with an app such as Google Pay or Apple Pay. For this data exchange to take place, banks build their own application programming interfaces (APIs) or use third-party APIs to interact with other systems. From a digital transformation viewpoint, APIs are indispensable in making banking services more open.

A study on APIs in banking by McKinsey found that nearly 70% of the surveyed banks planned to double the number of internal and third-party APIs and triple the use of public APIs. However, not all API integrations are successful. Close to 40% of the banks mentioned above did not have an API strategy or were still evaluating APIs. Mismanagement of APIs only increases operational issues, decreases productivity, pulls up costs, and delivers incremental results at best. Here we explore five API integration challenges and how to overcome them.

API Integration Challenges

Put simply, APIs are supposed to make it easy for disparate systems to work together. But poor integration can have the opposite effect, leading to silos, duplication of efforts, and rising costs. Some of the API integration challenges include:

Technological Complexity
High Costs
Security Risks
Time Consumption
Varying systems

Technological Complexity

API integration is not an easy process. In fact, of all the digital transformation initiatives, API integration may be the most daunting. The reason for this is that integrating APIs requires an overhaul of the bank’s core systems. Understandably, many banks and credit unions are reluctant to change their core systems in one go as seen in the chart below. Yet, 75% of banks state that the number one reason for focusing their corporate banking strategy on APIs is “improving internal corporate banking processes, workflows and product management.”

To carefully integrate APIs while upgrading core systems at a pace that is suited to the bank requires a team of experts including highly skilled developers that come with a heavy price tag.

High Costs

Hiring a team of experts to execute APIs is only one part of the cost of integrating APIs. The question for many financial institutions is one of build or buy as this requires significant financial resources, a dependable developer ecosystem, as well as a strategy to monetize these APIs so current costs may be justified. Building a single API can cost upwards of $10,000 (as of 2020) depending on the complexity of the integration and the times it takes developers to build it. Buying APIs may come at a lower cost. Either way, there is no getting around the expense of building APIs and integrating them with core systems.

Security Risks

In Canada, the number of stolen records went up by 4,379% between 2015 and 2020. A data breach in Canada costs approximately $6.35M CAD. The use of APIs is reliant on web-based applications, which means that they are more open to threats from hackers and ransomware. Add to this the fact that a data breach can severely damage the reputation of an organization. API integration projects require hiring a team of security experts as well as updated security protocols.

Time Consumption

Setting up an API connection and integration module can take anywhere from a few weeks to months. This is the time when the development team will learn the logic and architecture of your platform and work to reduce bugs, among other things. Financial institutions that choose the wrong API solution may find that they are losing out to the competition by coming in last.

Varying systems

Within APIs and API systems, there are all kinds of architectures and software. Every system has its own logic and therefore each integration has its unique challenges. With every new system that developers work with, they need time and expertise to integrate APIs with those systems. Therefore, with multiple integrations, the process does not get faster and only becomes more complex

How to overcome API integration challenges

API integrations are a necessity as we move towards an open banking system. Financial institutions must have a clear strategy on how they want to implement, govern, monetize and market APIs to avoid high costs, duplications, and incremental gains.

Blanc Labs has partnered with Axway to provide specialized solutions that make API integrations more efficient and cost effective. Benefits of our unified API platform include:

Increased productivity, as developers are easily able to find and repurpose APIs instead of duplicating efforts or wasting time searching for them.
Less technical complexity by unifying and simplifying API services across the organization
Better security through a unified view of all APIs
Faster upgrades of legacy systems through an API-first layer allowing you to add new services more easily
More robust governance through centralized documentation that multiple teams of developers can reference

Book a demo or discovery session with Blanc Labs to learn about the impact of our API solutions for banking.

Extraction: The Next Step in Intelligent Document Processing 

Partners | AI | Banking Automation | IDP | ML

Extraction: The Next Step in Intelligent Document Processing 

May 31, 2022

By Luciano Lera Bossi, Alejandro Nava and Parsa Morsal

One of the starting points of digital transformation, especially for financial institutions, is intelligent document processing or IDP. We previously explored classification as the first step in IDP. In this article, we will explore the next crucial step, extraction.

What is document extraction?

Document data extraction is a process of extracting data from structured or unstructured documents and converting them into usable data. It is also called intelligent data capture. With the rapid progress in document imaging technology such as the incorporation of natural language processing (NLP) and optical character recognition (OCR) as well as advanced analytics, we can now enable IT systems to understand the data that was thus far only on paper.

Powered by machine learning models and NLP, IDP systems can now bring the benefits of AI to document processing. The intelligence and detail offered by IDP systems today can be used for many functions including compliance and fraud. The level of granularity, accuracy, and speed offered by IDP systems today, can hugely impact the scale of digital transformation for your organization.

Document processing and the banking industry

The financial industry is no stranger to the benefits of IDP. In a recent study of 200 banks in the US, it was found that 66% of the respondents eliminated the need for manual processes for a typically labor-intensive industry thanks to IDP; and 87% cited accuracy and extraction as the key reasons for incorporating IDP into their systems. Given the emphasis on accuracy and extraction, it is important to understand how intelligent document processing coupled with OCR and NLP can give desired results.

OCR vs IDP

OCR as a document processing technology has been around the longest. OCR is used to extract handwritten or typed text in documents which can then be converted into data. While OCR has been synonymous with data extraction for many years, it is not without its challenges. Without intelligent processing of the data in understanding what the data is for, OCR may give inaccurate results. There can be errors in detecting a text block in an image (error in word detection), there may be errors in interpreting words correctly if there are differences in text alignment or spacing (error in word segmentation) or there may be errors in identifying a character bound in a character image (error in character recognition).

However, when combined with intelligent processes such as NLP and machine learning analytics, time-intensive processing tasks can be sped up with minimal errors. The biggest differentiator between OCR and IDP is that IDP can also handle documents that may be structured, semi-structured, or unstructured.

Structured Documents

Structured documents generally focus on collecting information in a precise format, guiding the person who is filling them with precise areas where each piece of data needs to be entered.  These come in a fixed form and are generally called forms. Examples of structured documents include tax forms and credit reports.

Semi-structured Documents

Semi-structured documents are documents that do not follow a strict format the way structured forms do and are not bound to specified data fields.  These don’t have a fixed form but follow a common enough format.  They may contain paragraphs as well. Example of semi-structured documents could be employment contracts or gift letters.

Unstructured Documents

Unstructured documents are documents in which the information isn’t organized according to a clear, structured model. These files are all easily comprehensible by human beings, yet much more difficult for a robot. Examples of unstructured documents include mortgage commitment statements and municipal tax forms.

Textual and Visual data extraction in IDP

The two main aspects that efficient IDP solutions tackle are textual data extraction and visual data extraction. In textual data extraction, the entity extraction technique is applied to recognize text in a document. This is a machine learning approach where the software is exposed to thousands of documents and the machine “learns” to identify information and segregate it based on certain semantic parameters. Entity extraction can involve a variety of tools and techniques including neural networks to visual layout understanding. By using entity extraction methods, you can avoid going down the template route and thereby use the software on various kinds of documents.

In visual data extraction, IDP solutions can be designed to understand elements such as signatures, tables, checkboxes, logos, etc. Visual data extraction is more complex than textual data extraction as it involves detecting, analyzing, and extracting information from the regions with visual elements accurately while also denoising content that is not relevant. Using machine learning, advanced visual extraction models can also understand the structural relationship of the visual data and its relevance.

Choosing the right IDP solution that can handle both text and visual elements accurately across varying document types will ensure that there is no need for your back office to comb through documents once again.

Explore Kapti, our intelligent document processing software to find out how the power of machine learning and automated document workflows can transform your organization’s document processing experience.

Delivering a world-class teledermatology solution in partnership with MedX and Smile Digital Health

Healthcare | FHIR | Interoperability | Technology Architecture

Delivering a world-class teledermatology solution in partnership with MedX and Smile Digital Health

May 5, 2022

In 2021, MedX Health Corp (MedX) engaged Blanc Labs to upgrade the SIAscope from PC-based hardware to a browser-based, multilingual interface that could also host patient data in a secure cloud. In collaboration with MedX stakeholders and Smile Digital Health, Blanc Labs’ multi-disciplinary team of designers, engineers, and product specialists created a solution within just twelve months.

In this webinar, Blanc Labs CIO, Dariush Zomorrodi, speaks about Blanc Labs’ partnership with MedX and Smile Digital Health in delivering an efficient and effective teledermatology solution to a global market.