Fintech Finastra’s Fusion Cloud Core Banking Helps Firms Quickly Deploy Digital-First Banks, Company Exec Explains

The Coronavirus crisis has accelerated digital transformation across the world, including the APAC region, which has resulted in many bank branch closures.

There’s also been a significant increase in retail banking activities that’s supported by all-digital challenger banks. These virtual banks are digital-first and are usually more focused on improving customer experience (CX) than incumbents.

Despite the socioeconmic challenges created by the COVID-19 outbreak, many new banking challengers have been able to grow their client base due to many more consumers engaging in online shopping and performing digital transactions.

In order to stay ahead of the competition, Fintech challengers may want to consider a faster launch, as it could help test the viability of their product offerings – which can improve the ability to cater to customer requirements.

“Friends and family launches” or “soft launches”, where the product is offered to a relatively small group (like by invite-only or other types of recommendations), are tried and proven ways to receive good feedback that may be used to improve financial products and services. The earlier a Fintech firm can carry out a soft launch, the better or more relevant their product will be when it’s ready for a full launch.

If there’s a delay in launching a banking platform, then it can create many challenges such as a rise in long-term costs and also increases the chances that a competitor might launch something that’s better.

For new all-digital banking platforms, Finastra’s Fusion Essence Cloud core banking solution has been designed to support a 100-day implementation from the beginning or initial stage to the final phase.

According to Shweta Jain, Head – Digital, Product and Retail Banking Strategy APAC at Finsastra,  the company’s solution leads to quick and secure delivery, while “optimizing” both time and value.

As noted by Jain, this particular process includes several steps such as:

  • Conducting workshops or training programs with the bank in order to understand their requirements, and then outlining the minimum viable product (MVP).
  • Come to an agreement that the particular scope may fit well into the 100-day cycle, using “out-of-the-box” or innovative capabilities (if possible) to minimize the number of time-consuming apps and other integrations.
  • Having well-defined goals is key to the success of the 100-day cycle. After these goals are established, development and testing can begin.
  • Development is carried out using agile methodology, and sprint cycles lasting 2 to 3 weeks. And every few weeks, validations are offered to the bank to show the capabilities and milestones completed. The Cloud-enabled environment of Fusion Essence aims to support these capabilities, launching the new business capabilities in a pre-User Acceptance Testing (UAT) environment for bank testing. After the testing has been performed, the functions get moved or migrated to a Cloud UAT environment, and the bank can proceed with its official launch.

Jain added that a banking platform going live is only the beginning, as other new 100-day cycles may be launched when trying to integrate more solutions. As a banking service expands its operations, the Cloud-enabled environment helps it seamlessly add new products and services so that customer requirements can be addressed as quickly as possible, Jain explained.


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