This past July, Envestnet | Yodlee hosted a virtual webinar event titled, “Customer Journey: FinTech APIs, Platforms and Integration Partners.” The event was moderated by Mark Woollen from Hayden Technology and featured three panel guests:
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Lee Farabaugh, Co-Founder & President of Core10
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Sanjay Mathew, Senior Director – Oracle Financial Services
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David Nohe, CEO of FinGoal.
The panel opened with the guests providing a little more insight about their work and themselves. Lee Farabaugh works exclusively in the FinTech and financial services arena. Core10 helps their partners integrate and deliver services to their customers through their Hereshore® model. Sanjay Mathew heads financial services innovation (FSI) strategy for Oracle. He specifically focuses on FSI digital innovation and looks at Oracle’s entire portfolio to help drive innovative solutions into the market. He also works with a variety of FinTech partners which are part of our ecosystem to drive digital solutions into the market. The third and final panel guest was David Nohe, the CEO of FinGoal. FinGoal’s primary work is using AI to analyze consumer credit and debit card spending and having that advice show up inside of an existing financial services application. The AI does comparison shopping with every dollar folks spend, to ensure that they're getting the best bang for their buck.
The panel started off by discussing the challenges of adapting to the new world of COVID-19 and how it is affecting each party's respected business. Everyone agreed that they are finding new and innovative ways to improve the financial strength and wellness of their end users, and learning how to improve working remotely. They also remarked on the topic of build vs. buy in API work. Is it smarter to utilize and invest internal resources to build and scale API solutions, in house? Or is it a better use of resources to purchase solutions that are ready to go, right out of the box. The panel came to similar conclusions: building takes a long time, in order to out-do industry competition, it is smarter to buy from existing partners who will help integrate faster so that goals can be achieved much faster. But most importantly, Sanjay also concluded that it is not build vs. buy mentality, but rather a build and buy. A saavy approach is building a foundation and then buying a technology to complement existing in-house solutions. Or vice versa.
The panel discussion eventually transitioned to open APIs and how to transform the API universe. Sanjay spoke about open APIs and the need for a fundamental standard. Today, the U.S. does not have a standard for open APIs. Lee made sure to stress that open APIs would give us the ability to innovate and scale faster, something that I also wholeheartedly agreed with, because of the importance for data security and privacy.
Our panel also focused on the customer journey and hyper-personalization for end-users within FinTechs. I wanted to emphasize that the future of financial services is not only digital, but it’s hyper-personalized. FinGoal builds white-labeled services for financial institutions to provide hyper-personalized advice integrated into digital finance experiences. We know that this is the direction this digital banking is headed.
Lee also has very unique insight on hyper personalization, with her experience creating niche solutions for their FinTech partners. Lee’s team provides API integration and implementation services for financial services and FinTech SaaS companies.
Finally, the panel closed out with a discussion about a few subjects and challenges from each of the participants. Lee discussed Core10’s Hereshore model, which focuses on keeping development work in the United States. Core10’s goal with this program is to give developers an opportunity to thrive and build a technology career in the place they call home, while showing the industry how high-quality development work can come from unconventional places.
I hope we can make discussions like this part of an ongoing conversation. While our discussion was quite comprehensive, we only scratched the surface on how technology companies and FinTechs are adapting to serve their end users, especially during these uncertain times.
For more information about this webinar and to find out about more events like it, please visit the Envestnet | Yodlee Launchpad homepage.
