Banking as a Service: Predictions for 2023

After the financial crisis of 2008, traditional lenders experienced a drop in revenue and new players successfully gained traction after offering products that had been in high demand and long expected from existing banks. This trend advanced after regulators across the world endorsed open banking initiatives, data requirements were standardised and in turn, financial players gradually opened up to technology.

With the transparency that open banking provides, banks were encouraged to offer digital services, fair pricing, and increased security. Further, they are forced to utilise application programming interfaces (APIs) for seamless information exchange between partners. This trend has since evolved: with open finance, APIs can facilitate the interchange of data, products and services in an attempt to improve customer experience, offer greater choice, and control over their finances.

In 2020, the financial services industry - particularly banks - implemented emerging technologies to accelerate innovation across the infrastructure of core functions in real-time, and underlying trends that were previously being considered were utilised in weeks, rather than months or years. The coronavirus has led to relationships with consumers being reimagined and relationships with ecosystem partners being redefined; this also resulted in products and services being reconsidered.

Technology providers are no longer just technology vendors: startups, scaleups and even unicorns are now viable collaborators for financial institutions. In this post-lockdown era, banks are tapping into this partnership model to enhance their digital transformation to keep pace with customer requirements and avoid being disrupted by newer, more technology-savvy, entrants.

When banks work with technology companies, APIs can be built with a number of microservices that can communicate and connect with these third parties, building upon open finance solutions on cloud-based platforms. This allows financial institutions to scale on demand, pay for only what is consumed, and expand serverless architectures.

Financial institutions are no longer considering the cloud – the cloud is necessary for how finance works today. An emerging yet burgeoning trend that will continue to evolve and grow in 2023 – banking as a service (BaaS) - offers a new route to market for banks and empowers them to attract new, niche customers by leveraging the cloud.

BaaS also allows non-financial companies to push out financial products where and when they are needed, direct to their customers with minimal investment and with the benefit of cloud-based, pay-as-you-go pricing.

This Finextra impact study, produced in association with i-exceed, explores how financial institutions and technology providers can collaborate to deploy mobile and web-based banking solutions at a faster rate.