With cloud native core banking technology reshaping the global economy, banks can no longer delay their digital transformation efforts. Banks must embrace technology if they want to create products that are fit for this new digital world and if they want to remain relevant to their customers in the future.
Here are five key takeaways from our whitepaper that underscore why banks need a next gen core banking platform to effectively and efficiently manage the product lifecycle process:
- True innovation
Banks have long been hamstrung by their siloed approach to product categories, which suffocates creative thinking and limits innovation. If banks started to think about financial products differently - as collections of features, rather than traditional product lines - then product managers will have the freedom to think outside of the box. By adopting technology that treats those features as modular units - or building blocks - that can be mixed-and-matched at will, product managers would have the ability to create entirely new products or transform how existing products interact with each other. In a world where technology is increasingly defining how economies function, innovation has never been more important for retaining customers and maintaining a competitive edge.
- Build products faster
With legacy core banking technology, creating new financial products was time-consuming, costly and labor-intensive. Anyone who had an idea would need to secure a budget and put together a product engineering team, and then maybe a year or two later there would be a product ready to go to market. In today’s fast-moving digital world, even taking a few months to develop new products is potentially fatal for a bank’s long-term prospects. Having the right core banking platform therefore is essential for creating products at speed with zero coding or IT intervention needed. Next gen core banking platforms can allow product managers to come up with an idea in the morning and have it created and ready for deployment by the time they go home in the evening.
- Test drive ideas
In the past, when banks had spent months building new products at great expense, there would be an urgency to roll it out into the market once a product had been approved. Often that meant when something new was launched, it would be pushed out en-masse and all customers would experience it for the first time simultaneously - a habit that has frequently left banks scrambling to row back on new products when greeted by a wall of customer complaints. With next gen core banking technology, product managers have the scope to experiment and trial new ideas with targeted customer segments, allowing them to run A/B testing to better gauge what works and enabling them to make tweaks as necessary before a full launch.
- Launch with confidence
In addition to being able to test products on certain customer segments, new core banking platforms can also enable banks to perform dry-runs before going ahead with a full launch to ensure the roll-out goes as smoothly as possible. Banks can also stagger release dates so that different customer cohorts can access new products at different times. That ability to segment means banks can also better manage account migrations and merge or split different products as needed. The core banking platform may also enable banks to simulate product launches, helping product managers win internal support for new ideas and reduce the bureaucracy that has traditionally slowed the approvals process.
- Unlock data
Banks have traditionally struggled to realize the full value of their data. By adopting the right core banking platform, banks can ensure none of that data is going to waste. First, data can help generate deeper customer insights that can enable banks to provide more personalized services, improving the overall customer experience. Second, data can be used to learn more about how customers interact with products, giving product managers insights that can spark new ideas or improve existing products. Banks can also make changes faster, ensuring products are always up-to-date and relevant to customers, potentially reducing legacy clutter and helping banks become leaner and more responsive to shifting market trends.
We recently published a whitepaper on the Power of Data discussing how banks have the opportunity to stream data in real time across all of their business functions, unlocking the value of their data and enhancing the delivery of banking services to customers. Get access to it here.