Integration with clients is a robust process
FintechOS, developer of a digital banking and insurance platform, has grown steadily in its UK base, Europe and beyond. The fintech start-up is now setting its sights on the US.
After announcing plans late last year to launch a US office in New York, more than 10 people now work for the company there and across the country as part of a “go-to-market” team, explained Kedar Kulkarni (pictured), FintechOS’s Director of Ecosystems.
“It is a significant milestone, and I would say [the US office is] at the stage where it will be growing much, much faster than the rest of the company for the next year,” Kulkarni said.
The company launched in London, UK in 2017. It has raised $80 million in venture capital financing so far and today employs more than 500 people. Beyond London and New York, it also has offices in Amsterdam and Bucharest doing business across the UK, Europe and the US. In addition, FintechOS has customers in the Middle East and Asia Pacific regions, via multinational clients domiciled in Europe, Kulkarni explained.
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Primary customers include mortgage and retail lenders as well as MGAs and carriers on the insurance side. FintechOS has more than 55 customers globally right now.
Recently, FintechOS announced a partnership with Huddl Team, consultants focused on large scale digital and mortgage transformation services for the UK financial services sector. The partnership is designed to help customers get to market fast with pre-built products that work within their existing infrastructure.
Low-code platform
The FintechOS technology is a no-code low-code platform designed to help its clients rapidly launch and manage the next generation of products and services in areas including lending, savings, insurance, investment and embedded finance. Goals include giving clients the ability to reduce costs on outdated core systems but also to modernize operations and make the customer experience more modern, efficient and easy.
“Our mission is to help these financial services with institutionalizing innovation at a much larger scale, and more importantly, at a much faster pace,” Kulkarni said.
The company’s platform, he added, allows its clients to debut products with flair and focus.
“The software helps these organizations … define their products and be able to expose those products into the channels of engagement,” Kulkarni said. “It could be online, it could be on mobile it could be on the desktop, through brokers, on portals…”
Kulkarni describes the platform, which is built on the Microsoft stack, as having a few key parts. They include functionality centered around core banking systems such as managing the ledger and accounting for products as they are launched or adjusted over time.
“You need what we call the “products factory” where you define and configure your products, which is what the platform will be able to do, more like a person configuring a software program,” Kulkarni said. “There is a front end for the studio which the person goes in, creates … and then can test those products and make them live in the platform.”
There is also a lot of open connectivity by way of APIs at FintechOS’s front end or at the banks, where customers and the bank are interacting with the system itself. FintechOS uses a lot of data that enables more complex activity with their bank customers.
“There is no machine learning as such used, but a lot of banks have their own algorithms which they are using and we can use the feeds on those to enable … products,” Kulkarni said.
Integration
A typical bank or mortgage industry customer would want to integrate the platform into the “mortgage journey.” That can be done several ways, Kulkarni said.
Step one is to understand what kind of customer ID is used to do background or income checks, but also making sure the data is validated, and identifying elements of credit scoring or credit checks that bank customers typically use. This could include Equifax or Experian or “a lot of new financial technology companies” that enable uploading of drivers’ licenses or other forms of IDs for checks, he noted.
“These technologies we can integrate with very easily and many of our customers have done that, so that’s the first part of the journey,” Kulkarni said.
The next step is to work with bank customers in trying to assess when clients are eligible for products.
“Banks may have existing information from their own systems, which may need to be integrated into the FintechOS platform,” Kulkarni said. “At the same time, banks may also have credit decisioning technologies which they may want to integrate into this underwriting process, so sometimes we have to connect with those technologies.”
The company’s platform has a decision engine, however, which can help create specific business rules for these products, he added.
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At the stage where a bank is going to approve and disperse a mortgage, there are more potential integrations.
“There may be integrations with things like, checking the house or checking the value of the property insurance, so if there are some standard providers, the banks would want to use this information about … the house, what it was sold for previously,” Kulkarni said. “There are a lot of agencies providing that kind of information, which may be tapped into and integrated into the FintechOS platform.”
A typical process with mortgage lenders can take between 6 and 7 months, including testing and training. Larger banks have needed between 9 and 10 months until they go live, Kulkarni said.
As an SAAS offering, customers pay the company an annual fee that allows them to continue using the platform and make changes. Hosting and management of the platform is included in the fee.
