Innovo, an Australian leader in technology consulting, testing and software engineering today announced the launch of their Australian Open Banking Solution API Platform that allows banks and financial institutions to easily deploy a full CDR compliant solution.
This platform, built on MuleSoft’s Anypoint Platform™, provides an easy-to-deploy system and interface that will enable financial institutions to easily unlock new digital banking services and comply with the upcoming Consumer Data Right (CDR) legislation.
The Australian CDR legislation is set to roll out on July 1 2020 and will dramatically change the Australian banking and payments ecosystem, similar to the UK’s PSD2 and other open banking legislation around the world.
Innovo’s Australian Open Banking Solution is designed to dramatically lower the cost of compliance by enabling API reuse, speed up compliance, reduce complex API and connectivity structures while allowing extended data transfer capabilities that open up new digital services with third party providers.
“Realistically, banks and financial institutions will be challenged to achieve compliance by July 1 2020, given the current environment and global pandemic responses. They are also under increasing pressure to improve protection for online payments, encourage innovation in payment services, engage customers better, and make cross-border payments safer,” comments Paul Thorley, Chairman of Innovo.
“Innovo’s market-ready approach enables banks and payment service providers (PSPs) to refine their initial open banking or CDR strategy, adapt their offerings to the new payments landscape, and then meet the CDR compliance requirements.”
Innovo’s Open Banking Solution, built on MuleSoft Anypoint platform, represents a highly scalable, resilient API-led solution capable of significantly increasing revenue, reducing risk and meeting compliance standards with ease of deployment.
“Given the current market situation, amongst global pandemics and economic uncertainty, now is the right time for banks and financial institutions to look for easy-to-deploy solutions to meet compliance standards,” comments Marc Caltabiano, Vice President, Australia and New Zealand, MuleSoft.
“There is also a great opportunity for banks to use these economic conditions, and the MuleSoft and Innovo technology to turn CDR legislation into a catalyst for accelerated digital innovation. We’re moving at lightspeed across major changes now, and banks need every solution to increase revenue and improve customer service,” concludes Caltabiano.
MuleSoft’s Anypoint Platform helps organizations unlock the power of API-led connectivity, enabling organizations to connect data from any system – no matter where it resides – to deliver truly connected customer experiences. With Anypoint Platform, organizations can realize speed, agility and innovation at scale.
ABOUT INNOVO TECHNOLOGY SOLUTIONS:
Innovo began disrupting the software development and testing industry across Australia and New Zealand in early 2017 with a focus on providing best-of-breed technology delivered by expert Testing, DevOps and Project Management professionals. Innovo’s people bring deep sector-focused knowledge to client projects, to help them mitigate risks, lower total cost of operations and open up revenue streams out of their technology investments. Innovo’s agile methodologies and technology partnerships can connect customers to provide on-demand technology solutions with deep expertise and trusted delivery.
About Anypoint Platform
MuleSoft’s Anypoint Platform™ is the world’s #1 integration and API platform. It uniquely allows organizations to use API-led connectivity to unlock their data, empower their business with productized APIs, and create connected experiences, faster. Anypoint Platform is the only solution that offers a single, unified platform for iPaaS and full lifecycle API management, both on-premises and in the cloud.
MuleSoft is a registered trademark of MuleSoft, Inc., a Salesforce company. All other marks are those of respective owners.
Join our upcoming webinar on Open Banking & CDR in Australia and learn how to to capitalise on your technology investments and benefit from compliance.
Without any unexpected delays to roll-out, it is expected (at the time of writing) that banks and financial institutions across Australia will adhere to the ACCC’s released Consumer Data Right (CDR) legislation. One of the reasons for this is the now well-understood force of digital disruption from open banking, seen around the world in various models including Europes PSD2 mandates.
In addition to legally requiring the four major banks to share product reference data with accredited recipients, the rules clarify the parameters of the new system and give “legislative force” to the obligations in banking that become mandatory from 1 July 2020, detailing the rights, responsibilities, and possible penalties for all parties involved.
At the core of these directives is the need for banks to grant third-party providers access to customer accounts, payments, product data and other data through APIs. Non-compliance is not an option and the banking industry is having to embrace an ecosystem-based operating model in contrast to what is traditionally a guarded and siloed industry.
So how does a bank profit from these scenarios? In this blog series we have discussed a number of options.
In this blog we will be discussing banking-as-a-service.
Open Banking APIs are valuable assets for financial services firms, as they enable them to enhance their service offerings, improve customer engagement, and build new digital revenue channels.
To build an effective Open Banking API strategy, financial services firms must be able to future-proof their technologies to ensure agility and speed, create lucrative APIs that are monetised as a source of competitive advantage, and deliver these securely. Some of these strategies are built into a single service platform, under the moniker of ‘Banking-As-A-Service’.
A “banking-as-a-service” model – essentially enabling businesses without a banking licence to deliver banking services from a licenced bank digitally via APIs, or application programming interfaces – is a promising concept in global financial services, although common in other industries such as software development.
So what is banking as a service?
Here’s a detailed breakdown of a basic API-based Banking as a Service stack:
- The bottom level represents the traditional, nationally-chartered financial institution (bank) that partners with the BaaS provider. Now commonly known as the “infrastructure provider”.
- The middle represents the “Bank-as-a-Service” layer that maps out banking services customized as an ecosystem for fintechs and payment providers to deliver products to end users. This part of the stack sends data back and forth between the bank and the fintech through an intermediary.
- The top layer is the fintech company that interfaces with the end user — receiving data from customers on transaction requests that it sends to the BaaS layer. The BaaS provider also sends data from the bank to the FinTech as responses to transactions requests.
Additionally, banks in this model can develop Banking-as-a-Platform (BaaP) and allow companies to directly plug into their core infrastructure for banking products on-demand — and charging for access along the way.
Recently Westpac announced that they are teaming up with a UK based cloud-native banking technology provider to build a similar platform to the one described above. This greenfields platform will enable third parties – ie fintechs – to distribute Westpac banking products to their clients. This will be a major shake-up of their core banking technologies and a huge competitive advantage for the Australian major bank.
The power of banking-as-a-service all drills down to the API layer – through transforming banking into a platform business model, banks can expose existing and new functionalities to participate in the market, partner with fintech firms to enhance services and monetize APIs, and, most importantly, embed their position within the value chain of financial products.
Stay tuned for our upcoming webinar:
Banks and financial institutions in Australia face a looming July 1 deadline to meet Open Banking and CDR compliance legislation this year. But, when it means making a significant change to your business strategy, internal systems and technology infrastructure, Australian organisations can fall behind. In this webinar, we’ll be discussing covering:
The Reality: Where Australian financial institutions stand in their open banking journeys
The Problems: What challenges they are facing
An Ideal Scenario: Critical success factors for a winning open banking strategy and implementation
The Requirements: Capabilities internal and external required to excel in open banking
Tuesday, 26th May at 1.00pm AEST
About Innovo Technology & MuleSoft Open Banking Provider Solution:
At Innovo, we’re a development and software testing organisation with experience working with external standards and payments processing systems. We’ve recently partnered with MuleSoft to help Australian finance, insurance and superannuation organisations overcome the CDR and Open Banking challenges.
Our solution involves the application of experienced Open Banking architects and developers who work on a pre-built Innovo & MuleSoft solution that is more than just an API. With an integrated layer of people and technology, our solution is taking pre-configured and customised, and quickly deployed – allowing your business to hit regulatory deadlines and in delivering a solution which is fit-for-purpose now and scales for the future.
The platform provides API hosting, Developer self-service portal, Identity Management (including strong authentication), a testing environment that mimics production behaviour, and the ability to integrate to an internal integration bus in either on-premise or cloud environments.
The Innovo solution is built on proven market leading MuleSoft technology, with all the integration and customisation required to deliver an Open Banking solution already done for you and available OTS.
Financial services in Australia have seen more disruptive technologies introduced over the past three years than any other industry. With the rise of COVID-19 and other major disruptions to the market, including the Australian bushires – banks are moving fast to meet customer demand and upcoming Consumer Data Rights compliance measures to be implemented on July 1.
To meet customer expectations for on-demand delivery, banks must look beyond digitizing existing services and establish open banking platforms for connected digital services.
In this blog series we will be deep-diving into competitive advantages for banks adopting Open Banking standards. One of the key competitive advantages banks can implement include enhance service offerings.
Enhance Service Offerings with Open Banking APIs:
One cannot underestimate the fundamental role of APIs in Open Banking initiatives. In the new ecosystem of Open Banking, APIs are an opportunity to open up new services for customers and internal teams.
However, these APIs can also create a threat for banks by opening doors to fintech firms, who may leverage this data to extend their own offerings as well. As experts in open banking solutions in Australia, we see the most successful banks taking this as an opportunity to progress and growth, rather than thwart fintech competition.
By opening up their APIs, banks are able to easily connect other APIs in the market and services in order to extend their service offerings. This helps banks to extend their service offering without covering the overheads of development and maintenance which is essentially a staff and operational cost reduction.
Quick thinking banks can often white-label a fintech solution as their own, by opening up their API data, to still keep their customers within their network. This again, benefits the business by not having to invest in their own technology builds that may be slower-to-market.
Examples of such APIs include the Experian Connect API, which provides customers the ability to see their credit score in real-time through their existing bank account, or Pocketbook which tallies customer spending and budgeting through an easy-to-use interface. Banks have visibility over this data to help make decisions over lending or future product sales.
Yes, there is threats to the banking viability through Open Banking. For example, a fintech service bank’s customer API data in order to build one mobile application where customers budget their finances, manage their debt, and get real-time investment and financial advice through chat. With their large siloed services and slow infrastructure, the majority of traditional banks do not offer such debt and real-time finance management services these days. However, this is another opportunity for banks to innovate quickly and implement agile changes.
In order to establish their position within the value chain, banks must not turn a blind eye to these initiatives. In fact, fintechs are already creating such services by leveraging existing APIs or building their own through insecure methods such as screen-scraping. In order to capitalize on this opportunity and improve their customer security, as well as solidify their position as the central data and banking source, banks must better address this threat by owning this existing relationship and enhancing their own products and offerings through innovative partnerships.
Banks and financial institutions in Australia face a looming July 1 deadline to meet Open Banking and CDR compliance legislation this year. But, when it means making a significant change to your business strategy, internal systems and technology infrastructure, Australian organisations can fall behind. In this webinar, we’ll be discussing covering:
The Reality: Where Australian financial institutions stand in their open banking journeys
The Problems: What challenges they are facing
An Ideal Scenario: Critical success factors for a winning open banking strategy and implementation
The Requirements: Capabilities internal and external required to excel in open banking
Tuesday, 26th May at 1.00pm AEST
About Innovo Technology & MuleSoft Open Banking Solution:
At Innovo, we’re a development and software testing organisation with experience working with external standards and payments processing systems. We’ve recently partnered with MuleSoft to help Australian finance, insurance and superannuation organisations overcome the CDR and Open Banking challenges.
Our solution involves the application of experienced Open Banking architects and developers who work on a pre-built Innovo & MuleSoft solution that is more than just an API. With an integrated layer of people and technology, our solution is taking pre-configured and customised, and quickly deployed – allowing your business to hit regulatory deadlines and in delivering a solution which is fit-for-purpose now and scales for the future.
The platform provides API hosting, Developer self-service portal, Identity Management (including strong authentication), a testing environment that mimics production behaviour, and the ability to integrate to an internal integration bus in either on-premise or cloud environments.
The Innovo solution is built on proven market leading MuleSoft technology, with all the integration and customisation required to deliver an Open Banking solution already done for you and available OTS.