Building a Digital Masterpiece on Top of the Core

Digital banking has become a must-have feature. The coronavirus pandemic forced consumers to accelerate their adoption of digital banking tools; now they love the convenience and flexibility these products provide.

But what is troubling for banks is that many consumers do not care if these services are met by a traditional financial institution or a fintech challenger bank. U.S. consumers are increasingly comfortable transacting with an increasing number of financial service providers to get the specific products and features that are most important to them.

According to a recent survey conducted by Cornerstone Advisors, 35% of consumers now have more than one checking account, led by the 42% of millennials who have two or more accounts. The report found that challenger banks hold a growing number of these accounts by offering specific features that consumers can’t get from their existing financial institution.

This pressure is particularly high on community and regional banks, which lack the budgets and IT resources of the global banks. However, the technology powering challenger banks has also created an emerging option that enables banks to accelerate product innovation and effectively compete with larger financial institutions and challenger banks: modular banking.

Challenger Bank Tech, One Block at a Time

Community and regional banks in pursuit of innovation are often left to choose between two equally unappealing options: wait on a core that may not innovate at the speed they want or take on the risk of a massive core conversion.

Modular banking, on the other hand, applies the challenger bank approach of building hyper-focused services to the realities of a bank’s existing core and IT landscape. Modular banking platforms typically offer the same functionality as a modern core banking system. However, instead of building the entire platform at once, modular banking approaches service much like a set of building blocks. Banks only need to select the products and services that complement their existing systems’ functionality or build new digital products on top of it.

Put simply, modular banking looks at each piece of a bank’s functionality – such as Know Your Customer, card issuance, P2P or rewards – as a collection of loosely coupled microservices and application programming interfaces (APIs) that can be combined and deployed in a cloud environment to facilitate specific use cases.

Modular banking enables institutions to build specific products to meet the specific needs of their customers and quickly adjust as market conditions change. For example, a regional bank could solve an immediate need for banking products to offer contract workers with a pre-built module, before shifting to bring innovative features for families that make up most of the service area with teen and children accounts. A modular approach to digital transformation benefits small and mid-size community banks in two keys ways.

Quickly Develop New Products
By decoupling critical infrastructure, like the systems and processes that need to work reliably but don’t confer competitive differentiation, from the people, processes and technology focused on product innovation, modular banking provides a potential solution to execution challenges that banks face.

Productive Fintech Partnerships
Creating productive, long-term partnerships requires financial institutions to build mutually beneficial relationships with fintech companies. Innovating through fintech partnerships also requires banks to move fast, which is where modular banking comes in.

The open architecture of a modular banking platform can facilitate the rapid integration of third-party partners, by giving potential partners a modern API to connect to and build on top of. Bank leaders can take a much more proactive approach to pursuing and operationalizing new partnerships.

By building these strategic partnerships, they can create a competitive differentiator to fuel growth for the coming years.