Challenges: User experience
Today, the competition in the financial services landscape is growing rapidly with entry from the non-banks. Small fintech companies are nibbling away at large financial institutions’ market share for their products and services. The major value proposition from fintech is top of the line end-to-end customer experience.
A small anecdote on this was during one of my recent business trips. I traveled from Austin, Texas and used my corporate business card perfectly fine for various expenses, such as Uber, restaurants and my hotel. But, upon my return when I reached Austin Bergstrom Airport and wanted to rent a cart, the system rejected my credit card and locked it from further use. Luckily, I was at the end of my trip, but it gave me a bad user experience and denied the merchant from having a new transaction.
Every year, billions of dollars of good transactions are denied against the merchants due to lack of intelligent automation systems to check fraudulent versus clean transactions correctly. The banks and major financial institutions have solid technology from various vendors, which traditionally focused on internal employee functions rather than customer experience. However, today’s tech savvy millennials need a very different user experience!
With experienced baby boomer’s generation on their way to retirement and IT teams more burdened than ever with huge backlogs, there is no one to help the business unit users who really understand how their business functions and what a true customer experience should be like. Throwing a customer facing login page, or a registration portal in front of end users, does not fulfill the experience. The off-the-shelf products from many vendors do not satisfy the best user experience that can be delivered to end customers—a one-size-fits-all approach simply does not work. Every bank or financial institution wants to be unique in their value proposition and wants to be on the driving seat. Unfortunately for these aspiring financial institutions, bespoke development and customizations are going to be very costly and not replicable.
The problem is exacerbated by the fact that many large banks and financial institutions have either bought specialized vendors’ siloed products for applications such as checking/savings account management, small business loans, auto financing or fraud detection applications. To provide a consistent user experience, end-to-end (E2E) solutions may need integration between different vendors’ systems. This creates a very disconnected experience—confusing customers, taking longer to build, maintain, upgrade and perform any additional enhancements that are needed encompassing multiple vendors’ products.
Strategy: Low-code Hyperautomation
Low-code and no-code automations help the business users, non-engineers and non-developers solve the end-to-end customer experience problems easily and quickly by creating the use cases themselves. The modern technology stack of low-code automation tools enable the citizen developers to solve their problems and replicate to scale across other businesses without having to rely on their overburdened IT staff.
One example of low-code automation is how many traditional systems are focused on identity verification or KYC, whereas, most of the frauds for a loan financing may be happening through a fraud paystub of the consumer. As pay stubs are the correlators for whether a consumer will pay back their loans successfully on time, it is important to apply AI/ML automation to understand the validity of this important correlator to avoid defaults. Understanding a fraudulent transaction versus a clean transaction quickly and correctly is also very beneficial for the merchants as well as end customers for better user experience and revenue generation.
Solution: Automation Platform
Waylay’s low-code horizontal automation platform is cloud agnostic and built from the ground up with security and scalability in mind. Combining the power of a high-performance rules engine that can work on streaming data, as well as contextual data from multiple IT and financial systems, making decisions when to apply AI/ML algorithms verus as to when to apply rules creates a balanced high performing solution with reduced false positives. Waylay’s low-code automation solution can also run in a hybrid mode where a subset of the rules are pushed to the edge for low-latency computations of local data and higher privacy and security governed by the local laws. Business units in financial institutions will get significant acceleration in their immediate roadmap execution, mid-to-long term strategy and go-to-market with Waylay’s low-code automation platform.
