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As the FinTech world offers more applications and opportunities by the day, financial institutions are competing to keep up with new innovations that deliver fresh and compelling consumer experiences.
Bringing new technology into your ecosystem brings the promise of better consumer experiences, accelerated business ventures, and increased efficiencies. However, barriers presented by your core provider and point-to-point integrations can take a toll on your team, resources, and timeline.
Financial institutions are having fragmented experiences with their third-party vendor and internal systems connections, causing them to manually move data from system to system, taking up valuable time and leaving significant room for human error.
A dynamic FinTech Onboarding platform to handle your Application Program Interfaces (APIs) can automate and streamline these manual processes for both external applications and internal systems, allowing for agile growth with the need for less time and resources.
What are APIs?
APIs are sets of software intermediaries that allow two or more programs to exchange information bidirectionally, or “point-to-point.”
APIs are already common in financial institutions’ software stacks, but the problem with having these integrations without a dynamic strategy is having to manage several independent point-to-point connections that don’t communicate with each other.
What is Integration Platform as a Service (iPaaS)?
In the same way that Software as a Service (SaaS) has taken off the past several years, Integration Platforms as a Service (iPaaS) is following suit. Simply put, iPaaS acts as the central hub for APIs and integrations; a FinTech hub. This type of integrative platform is the next iteration of the API revolution.
A platform to centralize APIs provides financial institutions with standardization on how applications are integrated into their organization, creating consistent connections that can be re-used in the future to save time, money, and developer resources.
A dynamic FinTech hub provides financial institutions with integrative open banking tools that can unlock access to their banking core data, eliminate dependencies on third-party vendors, and simplify connections to applications and real-time payment networks.
How is this Helpful to Financial Institutions?
The implementation of a FinTech hub gives financial institutions the power to break away from point-to-point solutions and allows them to be agile with their innovation and integrations. With the ability to establish and easily reuse connection pathways, financial institutions do not have to rely on vendor or developer resources or limitations.
This means that once an integration strategy and initial connections are established, financial institutions can reuse and iterate off their initial APIs, so they can deploy new solutions in days rather than weeks or months, without the need for outside resources to do the heavy lifting.
FinTech hubs are also being adopted to improve internal systems to streamline and automate manual or inefficient processes, such as change of address for contacts.
Use Case for API Integration for Financial Institutions
This year, Gulf Winds Credit Union partnered with FTSI and PortX to establish an API strategy and implementation.
Their first integration project connected members with a third-party lending platform, which now provides members with an instant loan offer without leaving the Gulf Winds online portal.
Because the FinTech hub allows Gulf Winds to exchange information with their lending offer platform, members can fill out their information and receive an instant loan offer under the Gulf Winds website without being redirected, making for a consistent user experience for members.
Additionally, if Gulf Winds chooses a new vendor in the future, they may simply reuse the already-built connection(s) from this project, reducing cost, saving weeks of time, and removing the need for developer time and resources.
To learn more about this use case and FinTech hubs, watch our webinar on demand, Accelerate FinTech Partnerships with API Integration.
Join our guest speakers from Gulf Winds Credit Union and PortX, the minds behind a coding-optional FinTech hub, as they discuss this recent partnership and how a new API integration architecture provides smooth, connected experiences for their members seeking instant loan offers.