The British Bank Awards is now in its seventh year, and aims to put the spotlight on the very best financial services firms. Run by Smart Money People, the “Oscars of the banking world” help identify the best products, hottest innovations and most trusted financial brands and partners in the UK via a public vote.
With the awards having attracted record voting numbers this year, The Fintech Times meets the finalists for the ‘Technology Partner of the Year’ category.
Yobota
Meet Yobota
Yobota is a London-based technology company. Founded in 2016, Yobota has built a fast, flexible, cloud-native core banking platform, which allows established, and challenger financial institutions to create and launch innovative, user-centric products in a fast and reliable way. Our platform is resilient, extensible and ultimately proven in a highly regulated and sensitive industry via our live clients and their multiple brands.
What makes us different?
We are building the future standard of core banking technology – focussing on tangible results for our clients and ultimately for their customers. We’ve established some great proof points for our platform, which has been the foundation of new and innovative financial products to consumers.
What it would mean to win?
We have set ourselves a very broad mission… Winning an award like this is a really important recognition that we are on the right track!
IBM Watson
Meet IBM Watson
Watson helps organisations predict future outcomes, automate complex processes, and optimise employees’ time. Designed to make it easy for clients to use their data from numerous sources, apply the recommendations and predictions from AI models, to seamlessly serve their own clients faster and more efficiently.
What makes you different?
Watson changes how work gets done. The gift of automation is the gift of time. By using automation and AI across the entire enterprise — IT, customer service, risk management and more — will augment core strengths, supplement weaknesses and empower employees. As a result, Watson saves time and automates more processes, so that your team can focus on new opportunities and find better ways to serve your customers.
What would it mean to win?’
The IBM and NatWest relationship together developed an AI-powered digital assistant that has successfully served upwards of 15 million customers and helped many people remain safe during the disruption caused by Covid-19. By winning this award would be an acknowledgement of a job well done, for all of us.
SurePay
Meet SurePay
SurePay, an inventor of Confirmation of Payee (CoP) service, was established in 2016 and has significantly expanded the customer base from banks to corporates and partners. SurePay now has over 20 banks and 150 corporates.
Since its inception, SurePay has performed over 3.5 billion checks. In the Netherlands, SurePay checks 99.4% of Dutch payments, with impressive results: 81% drop in fraud to Dutch IBAN’s, 67% less misdirected payments. CoP checks are performed in a sub-second and SurePay has a system availability of 99,98%.
At SurePay, our aim is to protect both our clients and their customers against the growing threat of fraud and misdirection, giving them the reassurance, their payments are going to the intended recipient. We are proud of the best in class protection we offer and the positive difference our service is making to all of our clients.
What makes you different?
As an inventor of CoP, SurePay’s experience in the past five years has been instructive: rolling out CoP through the Dutch banking system allowed the company to enhance its algorithm, and produce a best-in-class solution that is fit for markets like the UK, Germany and across Europe. SurePay also offers other product features such as cross border payment checks, Switch Check and SurePay PayID/ PaytoMobile. Customers like NatWest, Atom, ABN AMRO and HMRC chose SurePay for the best in class CoP algorithm, efficient onboarding, expertise and great customer service.
What would it mean to win?
We would be delighted and honoured to win this award and to receive the recognition from our industry peers. We have been working hard to enhance our technology and continually help our clients fight fraud. This win is a testament to the dedication of our entire team. We have been investing in both our people and our solutions to help service a broader range of corporates, banks, and partners. We are proud of the work we are doing and will continue to lead the way in our industry by developing technology solutions and providing outstanding customer service.
Artesian Solutions
Meet Artesian Solutions
Prior to launching Artesian, we’d experienced the birth of the Business Intelligence software category and learnt how interrogating structured data could drive improved decision making. We wanted to take these principles and push the boundaries further, combining structured firmographic data with unstructured data – news, social media etc – to drive advanced AI-powered decision making.
Today Artesian is a leading provider of client relationship intelligence and risk solutions. We work with 80% of the UK’s Tier 1 and 2 banking institutions and financial service providers, helping them find their next customer, identify risks, engage effectively and solve complex, high-value challenges in B2B frontline teams.
Artesian combines innovative data science with the world’s best premium business information. A powerful Insight Engine using bespoke processing rules, connectors and APIs delivers a uniquely configurable platform that solves numerous high value and complex challenges from business development, sales engagement and customer management to mission-critical tasks like monitoring and reducing exposure on a portfolio of clients, risk screening, customer onboarding and streamlining the KYC process.
What makes Artesian Different?
At Artesian, we’re tackling some of the biggest challenges facing frontline teams and in doing so, we’re removing silos that have traditionally formed both in teams and data availability.
We do this by combining the latest advances in data science with a revolutionary way to harness the collective expertise which exists within frontline banking and financial service teams. We call this the Know-How Equation. At its core, Artesian is a powerful rules-based platform that ingests millions of structured and unstructured data points. This is combined with a company’s unique business know-how to create a configurable platform that quickly delivers impactful insights and risk intelligence needed for decision making, as well as achieving efficacy and consistency at scale.
Artesian has been proven to drive a 94% improvement in client onboarding speed, setting the benchmark for commercial FSI automation.
What would it mean to win?
As a relatively new kid on the block, we’re very proud that Artesian has been considered among the brightest and best in the industry, as this is what the British Bank Awards represents. Putting the client at the heart of a financial transaction sits at the very core of our mission. This accolade would be another validation of an industry that is embracing digital transformation while continuing to remain customer-obsessed. That for us is the ultimate goal so a win would mean a lot to us as we continue to push for excellence in ourselves and our banking customers.
DPR
Meet DPR
Part of DPR Group, DPR provides an end-to-end (origination and servicing), multi-channel, fully integrated software platform delivering a range of solutions for Mortgages, Savings, Loans, Equity Release, Short Term Lending, Commercial Real Estate and Second Charges.
Our award-winning solutions and services are trusted by more UK institutions than any other technology provider including established and challenger banks, building societies and specialist lenders alike.
We have over 20 years of experience in the market meaning we deliver subject matter, as well as technical expertise and build a partnership with our clients to deliver unrivalled customer experience and operational excellence.
What makes you different?
With over 40 clients, DPR is a leading software provider, which designs, develops and delivers its own technology. Our solutions are built in-house by an experienced and knowledgeable team, with the evolving needs of the market at the centre of everything we do.
What would it mean to win?
The pandemic has been a difficult time for people and businesses around the world. The financial sector has had to adapt to a new way of working and has relied on experienced technology partners like DPR, to provide solutions that increase efficiency and reduce disruption. Winning Technology Partner of the Year would affirm that we are delivering the right features and functionalities to our clients; It would also recognise our dedicated and innovative team.
TrueLayer
Meet TrueLayer
Founded in 2016, TrueLayer is a global open banking platform and a market leader, routing over half of all open banking traffic in the UK, Ireland and Spain. We make it easy for businesses to integrate payments and financial data into any app or website to build better financial experiences for their customers. Our clients include innovators in every industry, from fintechs like Revolut, Freetrade and Nutmeg, to large enterprises, and the Ministry of Justice. Millions of consumers and businesses trust TrueLayer to securely access their financial data and initiate payments.
What makes you different?
TrueLayer’s vision is to create a financial system that works for everyone by putting fintech at peoples fingertips. We focus on building industry-leading products on top of open banking. With PayDirect, we’re combining instant payments and withdrawals with a seamless user experience, creating a high-converting, low-fraud, mass-market alternative to card payments. With our Verification API we’re going beyond open banking data to verify identity and account ownership, solving a very complex and expensive problem for multiple industries.
What would it mean to win?
A huge amount. We’re proud of our collaborative approach to working with our clients – from understanding their pain points, onboarding and ensuring they are seeing success with our products, to supporting them to continually deliver the benefits of open banking to their customers. The award would reflect the hard work and dedication of the incredible TrueLayer teams that deliver an exceptional customer experience.
Primary Bid
Meet PrimaryBid
PrimaryBid gives individuals access to one-off public company fundraisings and IPOs on the same terms as institutional investors. We’ve raised over £750m through our digital capital raising technology, enabling 100,000+ investors to participate. In partnership with the London Stock Exchange and Euronext, PrimaryBid has created the infrastructure to seamlessly connect retail investors with public companies when it matters most.
In 2021 PrimaryBid launched its digital IPO product. This has been adopted by Deliveroo and PensionBee, and for a number of other ‘blue-ribbon’ transactions during spring 2021.
What makes you different?
Our mission has always been to put the public back into public markets. While the process by which companies raise new capital from institutional investors is very sophisticated, the general public remains largely excluded from participating in these deals. This is particularly notable in Initial Public Offerings (IPOs), which despite their name typically do not include the public.
The issue of retail inclusion and treatment within the public markets is an issue of political and media interest, and PrimaryBid’s product delivers a solution to retail investors that is a significant improvement on the status quo. PrimaryBid’s service now has hundreds of thousands of customers and works hand-in-hand with established players (e.g. the brokerage platforms) to provide their users with access to capital markets deals. Looking ahead we will continue to innovate in capital markets technology for the benefit of the ecosystem.
PrimaryBid was created to change the state of affairs, driving improvements for investors and issuers in the capital markets. We operate at the intersection of capital markets finance, operations, regulations and technology, working with corporate issuers and their advisers to seamlessly include retail investors into their established investment banking processes. On the retail investor side, we provide investors with a UI/UX that delights and is available on smartphones via our app.
What would it mean to win?’
PrimaryBid has grown enormously recently and the award would be a recognition of the hard work and passion of our employees. We believe what we do has a purpose to help our extensive and growing community of retail investors in accessing offers that they could never participate in. As such, an award would not just be celebrated by us, but across our loyal and dedicated community of 100,000+ investors.
The British Bank Awards will take place on the 8th July, 2021
