It is fair to say that digital transformation has taken the financial industry by surprise. Growing each year and amplified by the pandemic, the need to bring banking, wealth and insurance industries into the digital age has been rapidly climbing up in the priority lists of the executives. And yet, the anticipation of a major traumatising change has stopped many high-level initiatives in their tracks.
CEO and Co-founder of Kidbrooke, Fredrik Daveus, writes: The staggering costs of updating decades-old IT infrastructure, researching potential suppliers and leading the cultural revolution among the employees are some of the challenges occupying the minds of the managers. Although many such concerns have solid grounds, there are several myths misleading the change-makers to perceive that the digitalisation process is more complicated than it really is.
For instance, the integration of next-generation, cloud-native software is often viewed as an issue. Many executives in the financial industry believe that implementing innovative technology on their platforms would take years. At Kidbrooke, we spoke to Sameer Datye and Hanna Viitanen from TietoEVRY, a large multinational Finnish-Swedish company providing IT and product engineering services, about their experience of implementing Kidbrooke’s API OutRank. Kidbrooke is an innovative Swedish wealthtech company specialising in providing financial analytics necessary for various digital financial journeys.
Background and Partnership
Sameer Datye, Head of Insurance and Wealth Solutions at Tieto, describes their WealthMapper platform as a “B2B platform that helps financial institutions connect and engage with their customers on mobile phones as well as on any other device of their choice”. WealthMapper facilitates simplified and intuitive visibility, accessibility and actionability on all the customers’ wealth instruments including savings, funds, equities, insurance, mortgages, loans and more.
In the context of a partnership, Kidbrooke’s OutRank API has been used to complement the WealthMapper platform with predictive insights on the performance of funds across several parameters. “With these predictive analytics included with the portfolio management capability of TietoEVRY’s core systems, financial institutions can offer their customers sophisticated goal-based saving too” says Sameer.
The Implementation of APIs
Hanna Viitanen, the Lead Enterprise Architect at TietoEVRY, elaborates on her experience of integrating OutRank into the WealthMapper platform. Although the API contains the capabilities for taking a holistic approach to end customers’ finances, TietoEVRY started small. “The current use case is simple goal-based savings, where the customer can create savings goals, get instrument recommendations, an expected outcome, create scheduled buy orders and track savings goals,” – says Hanna. She continues to tell us that the integration took only a couple of days, it was an “easy REST-based call” intuitive enough to perform the integration without any issues.
Implications for the Industry
Tech giants became that way by being bold enough to put the latest technology in service of the people. Although more constrained by regulatory scrutiny, the financial industry is likely to follow a similar path: according to Eurostat, 58% of European Union citizens used internet banking in 2019, up from 32% ten years prior. Asthe expectations and awareness of digital capabilities are growing among retail investors, financial institutions still struggle to provide customers with appropriate decision support. With tools like the one Kidbrooke provides for the WealthMapper platform, TietoEVRY will be able to help financial institutions expand the market and address the demands of the changing societal needs.
A major implication of TietoEVRY’s experience is of a rather practical kind. Just like some of the largest financial industry incumbents, TietoEVRY is a massive organisation with over 24,000 employees, operating in 20 countries worldwide. While developing software for the financial sector, it considers all the regulations that their customers must adhere to. In 2020, it took TietoEVRY just a few days to complement their innovative platform with a new array of digital capabilities by integrating Kidbrooke’s APIs.
Daveus adds: Yes, digital transformation is a challenging task in general, but its core technical part can for sure be easy given that the right vision is in place.
