7 Reasons why Financial Institutions need a Unified, Global Banking and Payments Platform

For years, financial institutions have been using disparate banking and SaaS payment processing systems, cobbling together across products to meet the needs of their customers. With new innovations and rapid improvements in technology, it is becoming harder and harder to stay competitive. While megabanks have the financial resources and the attention of the service providers to support new products and user experiences, most financial institutions are left to wait for years to offer new products that their customers demand.

To make matters worse, the branch network and personalized in-branch services, which were a competitive advantage for local and regional banks, are becoming less and less relevant to the next generation of consumers. The new consumer wants a highly personalized digital experience across all touchpoints, which these banks are unable to deliver using legacy infrastructure.

To remain relevant and effectively navigate the era of digital transformation, financial institutions need technology that can help them level the playing field to compete against large banks. They need an agile, adaptable, and customizable next-gen global banking and payment system — a platform that is customer-centric rather than the myriad product-centric platforms that they use today.

A customer-centric platform, such as i2c’s cloud-based unified banking and payments platform, enables them to offer a full suite of products with support for the latest innovations and industry-leading customer experiences. An integrated platform also helps with compliance and customer service, as it offers a full view of the customer lifecycle across the entire relationship.

The Benefits of a Unified, Global Platform

Let us look at the “why?” of these key issues, starting with how consumers have changed in recent years. They are not who they used to be 20 years ago. Today’s consumers want a new blueprint designed to reflect the types of interactions they expect to have with the companies they patronize. That includes fully digital and personalized experiences. At the same time, they want things to be relevant, seamless, and instant. It is a tall order, but today’s technology can make this happen if implemented appropriately.

For a solution to meet these expectations, it must offer several critical features. In a world where everyone expects the ease and convenience of Amazon and next-gen technologies like digital wallets and virtual cards, failing to provide this can be a significant risk for financial institutions and fintechs — and an incentive for customers to take their business elsewhere.

To stay competitive, financial institutions and fintechs need to look for a unified, global platform that works across several product offerings to accelerate speed to market with the following benefits:

1. Configuration versus coding for quick speed to market.

i2c’s building block technology allows clients to deploy and configure differentiated products within a single code base without writing a line of code. Through the right combination of over 100,000 unique elements and over 300 APIs, a client can power any use case or program design and get to market quicker with optimal efficiency. Once in the market, our clients can easily make real-time program changes as they manage their programs.

2. Greater agility to innovate.

Our unique approach to cloud-based payment processing also provides greater agility for clients to innovate. i2c’s comprehensive solution delivers a consistent, elevated customer experience across product offerings (core banking, credit, debit, or prepaid) on a single unified, global SaaS payment platform.

At the core of our proprietary “building block” technology is our modular platform architecture, with no coding required. i2c’s library of pre-coded building blocks can be configured in practically endless ways. Self-service features allow clients to simply configure and optimize as needed for scalability and growth. Plus, the platform itself is always available with 100% uptime so that clients don’t have to worry about delays or other speed issues. It’s also secure, as i2c has had 20 years to perfect our data and information safeguards.

3. Seamless, personalized customer experience.

Our clients can quickly bring highly differentiated products that surpass the best offerings in nearly any market — worldwide. Our platform is designed with flexibility and efficiency at its core, and most changes are simple configuration updates rather than major tech deployments. Clients can expand personalized customer experiences for cardholder-facing services, streamline transaction processes, develop new product offerings tailored to cardholders’ behaviors, and embed natural language processing (NLP) models into customer experience operations for enhanced compliance oversight and optimal training.

By analyzing historical data and identifying patterns, AI models can help enhance the overall customer experience by:

• Predicting customer behavior
• Offering tailored products and services
• Pushing proactive notifications
• Enabling targeted marketing campaigns

In real life, AI is great for identifying and disseminating best practices from top performers in customer support — such as using calming language for an irate customer or finding the most helpful information to share in each customer interaction.

4. Single view of the customer across products.

Our platform is built to provide a single view of the customer across core banking, credit, debit, and prepaid offerings. This allows clients to personalize and leverage their entire relationship across multiple products while minimizing friction and data leakage. A 360-degree view of customers also makes it easier to hyper-personalize communications and rewards — and ultimately create better products and services.

i2c’s platform allows clients to create a new product configuration or even bundle separate products into one offering, test it, modify it based on customer feedback, and deploy it using a sandbox-to-scale methodology to get to market quickly. This is simply impossible to achieve using multiple legacy payment platforms. With i2c’s single, global unified payment platform, it is easy. Financial institutions can test new ideas in the safety of a “sandbox” and deploy them into production

5. Global reach across all currencies, languages, and time zones.

Global reach is one of i2c’s most significant advantages. Because our platform operates from one code base, our clients can easily power any use case — across core banking, credit, debit, or prepaid — in any region and quickly test and deploy it around the world. With i2c, scaling into new markets is simple and quick.

6. Ability to optimize P&L with risk mitigation.

Banks and fintechs need to continuously innovate to stay ahead of the curve in order to capture revenue faster and deepen customer relationships. As such, i2c offers everything from virtual cards and automated credit decisioning to highly personalized rewards and real-time coupons. At the same time, we don’t ignore critical fundamentals and have put a great deal of care into risk mitigation. As a payments platform for banks, i2c’s suite of risk management tools includes an AI-enhanced fraud rules engine, collections support, and state-of-the-art data protection.

7. Enhanced risk and fraud mitigation.

As i2c moves to real-time payments, we’ve integrated AI to enhance fraud detection and react faster to large-scale fraud attacks. Our AI and ML models enable quicker decision-making by analyzing data and regularly updating dashboards for new or fast-moving trends. It can even determine how specific payment methods will likely be used in a particular area or by a specific customer group, indicating where further investment might be needed.

Find the Right Banking and Payments Processing Partner

Core banking and cloud-based payment processing are complex enough without organizations having to get embroiled in the headaches and security vulnerabilities that can come from coding their own solutions, testing (and retesting) them, and finally rolling them out. Because we understand this reality, i2c supports our technology with value-added services to help our clients kickstart their banking and payments programs, with services from Contact Centers and Dispute Operations to Fraud Risk Management and Program Management.

It’s important that companies leave the complexities of navigating around technology roadblocks to others so they can focus on their business. A reliable partner that prioritizes flexibility, convenience, customer service, and security is key. We have designed our approach around those principles, helping clients quickly configure and effectively optimize their card programs.

The time for digital transformation is now. Organizations that continue to struggle with multiple outdated legacy systems will quickly become less relevant in the rapidly changing marketplace. They can choose the future of payment processing today with a singular unified, global platform and look forward to an exciting new era of convenience and increased revenue for years to come.

Contact us today to learn more!