Five Fintech Solutions Every Bank Should Have

If Money 20/20 was any indication, it seems like banks are finally ready to really embrace fintech. Small and medium-sized banks have realized that their technology budgets can be used for things other than building and managing technology in-house to keep up with large financial institutions with big budgets and neobanks with brand new tech stacks. A tech stack is the combination of technologies a company uses to build and run an application or project, and typically consists of programming languages, frameworks, a database, front-end tools, back-end tools and applications connected via APIs.

For banks starting to explore fintech partnerships, we’ve compiled a list of the top five fintech solutions every bank should have in its tech stack today.

1. Account Opening Platform
New customer acquisition is one of the most important components of a successful financial institution. An online account opening platform powers an omnichannel interface to onboard new customers quickly and seamlessly. A good account opening platform should also provide a customizable user interface, increased account conversion rates and detailed reporting.

2. Identity Decisioning Platform
An identity decisioning platform, or IDP, automates identity and risk decisions across the lifecycle of your customer. IDPs power smart decisions that can reduce risk for your business while providing a frictionless customer experience for identity verification and onboarding, ongoing transaction monitoring and credit underwriting.

IDPs are the decision engine behind the account opening platform that helps banks determine whether to accept or reject an applicant. It continues to monitor that client’s account activity and powers underwriting decisions. Your IDP should connect to multiple data sources through application programming interfaces, or APIs, allowing you to add and change data sources as needed. By bringing all of your identity and risk decisions into one platform, you’ll see a holistic view of your customers and automate more decisions.

3. Open Banking Platform
Your customers expect to be able to access their financial data across various apps. Open banking platforms make it easy for banks to securely share data with third-party businesses through an API that allows customers to connect their banking data. Open banking platforms are the key component connecting your bank to popular apps like peer-to-peer payments, financial management and cryptocurrency investments.

4. BaaS Platform
You’ve probably noticed the trend of non-bank businesses beginning to offer financial products. This trend is powered through BaaS, or banking as a service, platforms. BaaS platforms enable a third-party business to integrate digital banking or payment services directly into their products by connecting them with a bank. This model allows non-financial institutions the ability to offer a financial product without getting a banking license. Unlike open banking platforms, which share the financial data within a bank account to a third-party business, BaaS platforms transfer the complete banking services into a third-party business’s product.

5. Know Your Transaction Solution
If your bank is starting to think about how to approach cryptocurrency and digital assets, one of the first things you’ll need is a Know Your Transaction, or KYT, provider to complement your Know Your Customer (KYC) procedures. KYT solutions help you remain compliant with anti-money laundering laws when monitoring crypto transactions. A KYT solution allows banks to track crypto funds and ensure they are not coming from mixers (a service that mixes streams of cryptocurrency to improve anonymity and make it more difficult to trace), foreign exchanges or blacklisted addresses.

Fintech companies can provide a lot of value to banks. Many of them are built to plug into your existing infrastructure and be up and running in weeks. They can help banks be more agile and adapt to new customer needs faster, save banks money on engineering resources and bring focused expertise to their category. Alloy also has resources available to help banks select fintech partners and build out their tech stacks.