Expanding a fintech company can get extremely complicated incredibly quickly. There are so many moving parts, operational complexities, regulation requirements, technological challenges, and more. It can be totally overwhelming!
Therefore, having the right core banking platform in place makes this entire process smooth sailing.
Your core banking platform acts as the critical foundation on which your entire business is built. This single technology decision has an enormous impact on your ability to grow and scale your business both now and well into the future.
Let’s discuss everything you need to consider when selecting the perfect core banking software partner for your rapidly scaling business:
Supporting Massive Growth in Customers and Transaction Volumes
When your fintech startup begins expanding into new markets, releasing new products, and pulling in new customers, you’re going to see transaction volumes increase.
We’re talking a 50x, 100x, even 500x increase in daily transactions compared to where you are now. Your platform needs to smoothly handle the workload today but also have capacity for your ambitious growth plans over the next 5-10 years.
One of the most critical factors to evaluate is a platform’s workload scalability – this refers to the ability to dynamically adjust its performance, capacity, and costs in line with large changes in transaction volume and processing demands. You need a solution that can remain fast, stable, and error-free even when your customer base and workload spikes exponentially.
Cloud-native platforms have huge advantages here through their ability to elastically scale up and down. Rather than relying on traditional on-premise hardware, cloud-based systems leverage flexible infrastructure services like AWS, Azure, Google Cloud etc. This makes it possible to instantly add more computing power, servers, storage, and other resources in an on-demand manner to precisely meet fluctuating demands.
With cloud infrastructure, specialized AI/ML algorithms can auto-detect increases in real-time volume and automatically rapidly provision additional capacity exactly when its needed to keep performance snappy. Then as volumes decrease, the systems can automatically scale back down to optimize costs. This elasticity ensures you have exactly the right amount of resources at any given time.
Even better, only paying for actual usage is tremendously cost efficient compared to purchasing enough on-premise hardware upfront to handle theoretical max capacity. Those servers would be massively underutilized most of the year! Cloud’s pay-as-you-go model aligns costs tightly to value.
Overall, the workforce scalability and cloud infrastructure underlying a modern core banking platform enables seamlessly absorbing massive spikes in transaction volumes today while giving you ultimate flexibility to scale to any level in the future.
Your platform should handle 5x, 10x, 100x, or even 1000x your current workload without breaking a sweat! That’s the type of scalability imperative for fintechs on an aggressive growth trajectory.
Streamlining Geographic Expansion Across Markets
Another exciting growth vector for your company may involve expanding globally into new geographic markets like launching locally compliant services across Europe, Asia Pacific, Latin America, and more.
Going global requires weaving together many complex considerations from languages, regulations, payment rails, partner integrations and much more. Your core banking platform plays a pivotal role in enabling you to efficiently expand across borders.
Some of the key features your platform needs to simplify geographic expansion include:
Local API Integrations – You will need to connect with country-specific banks, payment providers, card networks, local ACH systems and other players deeply embedded in a region’s financial ecosystem. Look for a platform that offers adaptive integration tools, microservices, and APIs to make it straightforward to interface with these localized players. Pre-existing integrations are a major bonus.
Multi-Language Support – Both your backend admin tools and customer-facing applications will require support for languages beyond English. From UI labeling to handling diverse character sets and encoding, your platform must make localization smooth.
Highly Configurable Workflows – Every region has its own regulations around payments, data privacy, contract handling, identity checks, taxes and much more. Your platform should offer intuitive tools such as visual workflow builders to easily customize processes on a per-market basis.
Flexible Product Configuration – Entering a new market often requires adjustments like adding locally popular payment methods, setting market-specific fees, tailoring analytics, and more. Your platform should make admin changes fast and painless.
Extensible APIs – If more customization is needed for a market, your platform partner should provide comprehensive APIs and microservices to build on. Access to core code through escrow is also valuable.
White-label Apps – You’ll want to deliver a consistent brand experience across geographies. Your platform should empower configuring and white-labeling mobile/web apps for each region.
The ultimate goal is entering new markets without engineering complexity or business disruptions.
The above capabilities provide the localization, configurability, and extensibility required for frictionless global expansion. With the right core platform, you can rapidly hoist your flag in new countries!
Supporting New Products, Services and Embedded Finance Experiences
Ever-evolving customer expectations require constant innovation with new products and value-added services. Your ability to dream up and deliver breakthrough experiences hinges on a malleable core banking platform.
Look for a platform that allows seamlessly incorporating offerings like:
- Support for emerging payment methods – from cryptocurrency to cross-border mobile money platforms popular in some markets.
- New card facilities – virtual cards, security tokens, loyalty programs, etc.
- Lending & financing – flexible product configuration for credit, invoices, embedded “buy now pay later”.
- Foreign exchange – increasingly expected for global services.
- Account management – savings, checking, joint accounts and more.
Equally important is the capability to partner with BaaS, embedded finance, and payment companies. This allows you to integrate complementary services from across the fintech ecosystem.
For wholly new product concepts, your platform partner should provide SDKs, source code access, and extensible APIs for custom building.
Ultimately, your core banking platform should impose zero limitations on your ability to experiment with new embedded finance workflows and create differentiated customer experiences.
Strategic Collaborations to Unlock New Markets
They say no captain can sail the seven seas alone forever. As you scale, forming strategic alliances with other fintech, finserv and even non-financial brands opens up huge possibilities.
Potential collaborations can unlock the ability to:
- Offer bundled products and discounted pricing for a stickier experience
- Expand into entirely new niche verticals by combining specialized expertise
- Enter challenging new geos by leveraging a partner’s local expertise
- Integrate with popular apps and services for embedded finance
- Co-develop new embedded finance widgets and apps
To make these strategic alliances successful, your core banking platform needs to serve as the flexible integration fabric connecting you and your partners.
Look for platforms with open APIs, microservices, pre-built connectors, and customizable workflows – these capabilities enable interoperating with partners to build novel combined solutions.
Ideally, your platform partner has existing relationships and integrations with key players across hot fintech segments like:
- BaaS/Embedded Finance
- Niche Vertical Solutions
- Cross-Border Payments
- Loyalty & Rewards
- Crypto/Blockchain
- and more…
This way, you can deliver innovative bundles and user experiences that would be extremely difficult to build alone. Stronger together!
Digital Transformation through Constant Innovation
To stay competitive, your core banking platform must empower constant innovation through emerging technologies. AI, ML, blockchain, quantum computing and more – these profound technologies are transforming fintech capabilities and experiences.
Evaluate how forward-thinking a platform provider is by the level of commitment to R&D and pace of releasing advanced capabilities. Look for excellence in areas like:
Data-Driven Intelligence – ML algorithms for personalized recommendations, predictive analytics, sentiment analysis, real-time risk assessment and more. This powers next-gen experiences.
Process Automation – AI capabilities woven throughout workflows improve efficiency, accuracy and speed.
API Extensibility – Open APIs and microservices enable quickly connecting new innovations.
Configuration over Customization – Composable architecture for tailoring vs. complex coding.
Fail Fast Experimentation – Test new technologies rapidly through sandbox environments for building POCs. Evaluate availability of tools like runtime configuration, feature flags, and canary launches.
Cloud-Native Foundation – Modern architecture optimizes deploying innovations. Assess containerization, orchestration, event streaming and more.
Insights-Driven Culture – Look for ingrained data-driven decision making. How extensively are analytics and experiments leveraged internally?
Bleeding Edge Capabilities – Review roadmap and look for aggressive adoption of innovations like Web 3.0, virtual/augmented reality, quantum computing and more.
Visionary Leadership – How forward-looking is the executive team? Do they actively shape fintech’s future?
Talent Magnetism – Assess ability to attract the best and brightest AI/ML, platform, and blockchain experts globally.
Security Obsession – With innovation comes increased cyber risk. Evaluate defense-in-depth strategies like fraud analytics, ML threat detection, data encryption and resilience testing.
Trust and Transparency – Will emerging tech like AI be implemented ethically and with proper controls?
Take Action!
The perfect platform partner will give your company the foundation and flexibility to set sail towards tremendous growth. If capabilities aligned to your vision, imagination is the only limit to what your fintech business can accomplish!
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