In our digital age, banks must shift their focus, and their solutions, to ensure delivering user experiences that meet or exceed customers’ expectations. Today’s customers view their relationship with their bank more as a personal relationship than a business one; and like most personal relationships, expect it to be built first and foremost upon trust. They place priority on being able to personally access their funds, digitally, from anywhere. And when doing so, they are trusting their bank to provide that access securely, protect their data and privacy, and be able to move their money quickly and securely. And for the bank to do all of this, it must completely trust its solution providers. Real time is becoming reality, and essentially a requirement, worldwide. The evolution to real-time personalized customer centricity will drive what products and services banks offer to compete and gain market share successfully. Whether your bank is long-existing looking to transform itself or is a de novo digital bank, you’re evaluating:

• How to satisfy customer expectations better than competitors
• How to ensure ongoing compliance with regulations, including recent requirements in the European Union (EU) concerning personally identifiable information and open banking
• How to build flexibility and agility into the future to deliver innovative solutions that can differentiate your bank

Banks know they need to transform, and countless vendors are eager to help. However, it is essential for banks to vet and select providers with the expertise and scope to beat the industry odds and make their transformation a success. We at FIS offer the solution and delivery certainty to do just that.

Modernizing the banking platform

Today’s focus on exceptional user experience, hyper-personalization and digital transformation requires a modern banking platform to support the bank’s evolution, operations and growth.
A modern banking platform has positive impacts on cost structure as well as user experiences – agility that allows for quick product launches, product launches from the core without significant investment, lower operating costs, more flexibility as data moves from mainframe to cloud and an elastic model that flexes with supply and demand.
Two strategies for modernizing and future-proofing core banking solutions and technology include the “rip and replace” model and a model of incremental modernization where cores as “components” can be decoupled and evolve according to the bank’s needs.

Achieving solution and delivery certainty

The uncomfortable truth, however, is that core banking replacement is costly and complex, and implementations are hard to deliver. Many consider modernizing the core banking platform risky, akin to diving off a high board into murky waters without a life preserver. The odds of a successful landing without injury are likely higher than successful transformation. Cognizant has estimated that only one-quarter of core banking transformations are considered successful one-quarter fail without any positive results and one-half do not meet transformation objectives. Often, costs and implementation times far exceed original estimates.
Given the disappointing success rate, the best way to achieve solution certainty and delivery certainty is to pick a partner with a proven track record. Careful vetting is critical to determine who has the expertise and scope to beat the odds and deliver a successful transformation. Criteria to begin your search include looking for a partner that is:

• Stable - Has a long track record of banking domain experience
• Proven - Provides examples of success in complex implementations and deliveries
• Transformation expert - Can facilitate your bank’s ability to transition to a customer-centric model where products and services are built to support the customer relationship lifecycles
• Digital innovator - Provides a real-time, event-driven, digitally enabled core solution
• Best-in-class technology provider - Has a platform that is high tech, agile-developed, cloud native and meets financial industry standards
• Forward-looking - Has success with building a future-proof platform that won’t jeopardize your bank’s ability to address future market changes
• Open banking enabler - Enables integration via APIs into extended components providing speed to market with products and services offering superior customer experience, thereby differentiating your bank and gaining competitive advantage
• Proficient product builder - Creates solutions, which are built to be scalable, inherently resilient and time-to-market sensitive
• End-to-end solution provider - Provides an end-to-end solution including core banking and extended components
• Compliant - Delivers regulatory-compliant solutions
• Client enabling - Can enable your bank to conduct business efficiently and effectively in all channels
• Efficient - Can support retail, small business and commercial customers with out-of-the-box capabilities

There is no one path to digitization, as each journey will be unique. We can state this with certainty: With FIS, banks have a strong and proven partner with best-of-class technologies and the delivery capabilities to make the journey a success.