Powering the Web of Partnerships to Make Innovation Easy

The right platform can help banks accelerate innovation, navigate the changing tech landscape and offer next generation solutions to customers. Public clouds are the platform to achieve these outcomes.

The cloud has moved from an ambiguous and amorphous buzzword to the platform that powers much of the innovation happening in the financial industry. Clouds, like Microsoft’s Azure, serve as the modern foundation banks, digital cores and other fintech firms use to build, develop, house and host their solutions. Participating in the cloud eco-system allows these players to seamlessly integrate with each other to expand their customer reach, take advantage of pre-built accelerators, and access third party fintech solutions. This ecosystem, with its multiple connection points, when housed on the same cloud means innovation can happen faster – at every level.

That accelerated innovation is crucial to small and mid-sized banks like Hawthorn Bank, a subsidiary of the Jefferson City, Missouri-based Hawthorn Bancshares. Banks must balance providing high-quality customer service and relevant products to customers while keeping up with nonbank and big bank competitors, but have limited staff and capacity for adding new tech projects and offerings. Hawthorn wanted to add more services and solutions for its business customers, like expedited online and in-person payments, which didn’t always fit into its traditional suite of offerings.

Hawthorn didn’t realize it at the time, but belonging to the right cloud network helped it address a number of their business customer’s pain points. The $1.7 billion bank relies on Jack Henry’s Banno digital banking platform, which now offers embedded invoicing and digital payment acceptance functionality through a partnership with Autobooks, as well as the full Autobooks small business solution as a seamless add-on to Banno platform users.

Both Autobooks and Jack Henry reside in Microsoft Azure, which made it easy for Banno to incorporate Autobooks as an additional service, as well as for Hawthorn to flip a switch to enable the service. And Autobooks proved to be a complementary, revenue-generating solution that Hawthorn Bank could bring to its business customers.

Examples like this show how coexisting in a cloud ecosystem can remove friction at all levels of development, deployment and integration. This has several benefits for banks and the end user. Being in the same cloud means that fintechs like Autobooks and service providers like Jack Henry can roll out new features and updates to their banks faster. It also helps banks control their third-, fourth- and fifth-party risks, which regulators have highlighted as a way to manage operational and cyber risk.

Selecting that cloud provider, however, starts with trusting the tech company as a secure partner who can meet regulatory expectations. Azure’s developers engage with more than 200 global financial regulators to meet compliance and security requirements, including hosting an annual summit to discuss new regulations and threats. Microsoft also accompanies regulators during audits at financial institutions. And Microsoft works with banks at the platform level to help them navigate projects with other partners, including audit, analytics and other digital banking overhauls and core integrations.

A relationship that close requires shared values – and increasingly, banks are noticing that some of their vendors may not be true partners. A number of large tech firms providing cloud, analytics and platform services to banks are also developing financial products on the side that could compete directly for the bank’s customers. Banks may find that their big-tech cloud provider doesn’t share their values or definition of partnership or compliance; they may treat private customer data differently. The ultimate risk for banks is that they partner with a firm that could one day become a competitor. Banks should look for cloud providers with a proven track record of staying focused on delivering value to the institution.

Community banks like Hawthorn are constantly looking for ways to serve customers better through innovative products and services, while keeping a close eye on costs and managing employee workloads. The right digital platform, powering their service providers and fintech partners alike, is key to unlocking and accelerating their digital transformation.