Founded by a group of banking industry veterans, Monument Bank Limited is a neobank startup in the UK focused on delivering a portfolio of savings and property investment lending products solely through digital app-based and online services.
So when it came time to assemble the right partners to develop and deliver Monument’s technology infrastructure that will enable them to compete for a win in a high sought after segment, they tapped the industry’s leading providers: Mambu, Salesforce, AWS, and Persistent Systems.
The team at LendIt Fintech invited executives from each organization to a roundtable session to discuss the experience and best practices. Listening to these individuals is always thought-provoking, and this session was no different. Here are the remarks that stood out to me the most.
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Customer need > technology need: “[Monument has] created a banking and a financial services organization around the customer—that’s the real key. How can we build what we need to around that customer? You didn’t take into consideration what the technology restraints are—you with what my customer needs and then figure out what the ecosystem needs to be.”
– Johanna Pugh, Managing Director for North America, Mambu -
Dawn of a new era: “With financial services—particularly with an ecosystem of different providers and the ability to integrate into non-bank services—you have this ability to make that customer experience so much more seamless than it’s ever been before. And we’re just at that very beginning of a cycle that allows us to continually personalize for financial engagement, using the big data and analytics and machine learning that we already see that come into the fore.”
– John Kain, Head of Banking & Capital Markets, AWS Financial Services - Teamwork makes the dream work: “The old days of vendors not being able to agree and work together on an architecture that a client wants to do are over. When this client sees us on the playing field together, we lock arms. We work out together where our innovations are going to climb, we get the right [systems integrator] like Persistent to help us work that through from a use case perspective, and we crush it. The days of not being able to find common ground for the customer are over for sure.”
– Geoff Green, Global Head of Mortgage & Lending, Salesforce - Neobank success means thinking several steps ahead: “We’re looking at how we can bring to market the products that we said we would as soon as possible, but we are already thinking, ‘What’s next?’ We want to extend our asset class base, focusing on the property lending team. But beyond that, we’re looking at the specific communities we’re serving to lead us into what additional products and services—not necessarily financial products and services—we can help them with. We are already trying to figure that out as part of the next journey that we will go on.”
– Sudip Dasgupta, Chief Technology Officer, Monument Bank
I’ll leave you with my final thought from this session as well: Onboarding is the most evident opportunity to differentiate.
Johanna Pugh at Mambu shared her experience onboarding with a traditional bank in the UK five years ago. It took three months, they asked for her passport four times, and she never did get a checking account in her name.
Onboarding a customer in today’s environment should take you less than three minutes. I shouldn’t need to meet anybody. I shouldn’t need to show my face to satisfy local Know Your Customer (KYC) regulations. The right technology should make interacting with my bank digitally, even easier than doing it in person. That’s the opportunity in digital banking today.
Whether your banking, financial services, or insurance organization has been around for 150 years or 150 days, Persistent Systems has the proven track record of designing, developing, and launching the leading-edge, compliant platforms and processes you need to succeed in financial services today. Learn more about our Digital Banking Capabilities.
