Finastra’s open cloud platform drives collaboration and innovation in financial services

Ahead of its FusionONE developer conference, co-hosted with Microsoft, Finastra unveiled the latest developments to its FusionFabric.cloud open platform for innovation. As half of financial institutions in the UK and US look to implement cloud collaboration, adoption of Finastra’s open platform is gathering pace, with over 300 Fintechs now registered.

Further to its strategic alliance with Microsoft, which sees Microsoft Azure underpin FusionFabric.cloud, Finastra has now built select solutions on top of Microsoft Power BI, Microsoft PowerApps and Microsoft Dynamics 365, via the platform. The move is part of the company’s shared vision to drive innovation through collaboration.

Separately, nbkc bank is collaborating with Finastra to build a conversational banking app on FusionFabric.cloud. This is all made possible by APIs, of which Finastra revealed 61 new additions to its developer catalog.

“What we are seeing today is an unprecedented shift in the way financial services businesses from across the globe collaborate, innovate and compete, with half of UK and US financial institutions looking to collaborate in the cloud,” said Simon Paris, CEO at Finastra. “FusionFabric.cloud brings together banks, Fintechs and SMEs onto a single open platform, allowing advanced technologies such as facial recognition, AI, machine learning and voice interaction apps to be created, deployed and monetized in the same ecosystem. The updates we are unveiling here are very much part of our goal to encourage collaboration in the financial services ecosystem and unlock limitless potential for innovation.”

The 61 new open APIs (and more than 200 Endpoints) span many of Finastra’s solutions, including retail and corporate banking (both enterprise and North American community markets), consumer lending and mortgage, payments and treasury and capital markets. These are now available in the FusionFabric.cloud API catalog for developers to harness in building financial services applications. Some of these powerful APIs are already enabling:

Finastra software built on Microsoft technology

Finastra has built its Fusion Mortgagebot solution on top of Power BI and PowerApps, via FusionFabric.cloud. Using innovative artificial intelligence and data visualizations, this functionality adds powerful analytics and dashboards to help users uncover trends and spot new business opportunities.

Moreover, the companies are doing the same with Finastra’s Fusion CreditQuest loan origination tool, now built on Dynamics 365. The module, LenderInsights, will empower banks and credit unions with a comprehensive end-to-end lending solution, connecting front office relationship managers with their back-office underwriting team, through Microsoft Office 365.

Richard Peers, Senior Director WW FSI Industry Strategy team, Microsoft Corp. said, “Our strategic alliance with Finastra continues to go from strength to strength and our work together is proof that collaborating within the financial services ecosystem is not only fruitful, but signals the next wave of the future of open finance whilst empowering people.”

nbkc bank (nbkc) co-innovation

nbkc shares its vision of encouraging Fintech collaboration with Finastra. In that spirit, the bank (which uses the Phoenix core banking solution) and Finastra are working together to build a conversational banking app on FusionFabric.cloud.   

Eric Garretson, CFO and Fintech Strategy Leader at nbkc said, “Voice services pose an untapped opportunity for the financial services industry. Consumer adoption of voice devices is growing rapidly due to the inherent on-demand access and convenience they provide. That’s not to say other channels will fade away, but more chatbot functionality and ability to bank via Siri, Cortana and Alexa will be increasingly important. For a community bank like us at nbkc, we want to be at the forefront of new and changing communication channels and ensure we can meet customers wherever they are; together with Finastra we’re building the foundation with the FusionFabric.cloud platform to do so. And, now that we’re connected to these APIs, we can innovate in other areas as well.”

Open Banking at scale    

Open Banking and PSD2 encourages European banks to open their systems and share data and APIs with third party providers (TPPs). This marks a whole new market for banks, BigTechs and Fintechs to consume other banks’ APIs and provide cheaper and faster service to the users. To support this move, Finastra is building Fusion Open Access with TPP APIs to help ease access for banks. This will enable them to consume APIs from other banks in Europe via one integration point, rather than multiple points across banks.   

Richard Lumb, Group Chief Executive - Financial Services at Accenture – an early adopter of the  FusionFabric.cloud platform said, “The era of Open Banking is in full swing now, creating threats and opportunities for incumbents. Our ongoing work with Finastra and Microsoft shows the power of ecosystem-players collaborating to establish viable platforms for the next era in banking. With more and more of the global developer community taking advantage of platforms like this, our clients who lean forward can go from strength to strength in Open Banking well into the future.”