Backbase, an engagement banking platform that enables banks and other financial institutions to accelerate digital transformation, announced it has joined the Microsoft Cloud for Financial Services, according to a press release sent to FinLedger.
Founded in 2003, the Netherlands-based company offers banking overlays that allow financial institutions to re-architect and modernize legacy technology operations. This approach means that even if banks or credit unions don’t have the resources to replace legacy systems, they can apply consumer-friendly digital layers on top to reduce friction with users.
“If you want to be highly mature and digital, then a lot of people think that means self build, right? Or if you don’t have the funds, that means that you have to go complete cookie cutter,” Backbase Senior Vice President Americas Vincent Bezemer told FinLedger.
“Neither is true, and that’s really what we try to attack,” he said.
The Microsoft ecosystem entrance means the company will now provide Microsoft users access to the Backbase Marketplace which provides third-party fintech interaction into online and mobile banking platforms.
It also means that Backbase can utilize Microsoft Azure technology to orchestrate customer experiences end-to-end and modernize their tech stacks quickly.
“Together with Microsoft, we can deliver so much more value in less time, enabling organizations to quickly adopt solutions specifically built for their industry. You can now use modular solutions with built-in industry standards that augment your organization’s current investments and are extensible as business needs evolve and grow,” Backbase CEO Jouk Pleiter stated in the release.
“Together we break down data silos, helping organizations take a data-first approach with a common data model that unifies information while adhering to industry compliance standards,” Pleiter said.
Backbases’ pre-integrated tech stack allows Microsoft Financial Cloud users to add three layers (Customer Engagement, Employee Productivity & Banking Processing, Cloud Infrastructure) to their existing systems.
These layers provide a range of engagement services including customer onboarding, channel siloing, advanced cloud computing and compliance scaling. The productivity layer also enables employee productivity metrics and utilities through Microsoft Dynamics 365, Power Platform and Teams integrations.
Customer needs
“There are three main buckets of what people need,” Bezemer said, explaining the three largest banking needs for consumers. “The first one is regulatory and security wise. You don’t want to authenticate yourself all the time, you want that to go fast and frictionless. But you also want to make sure that your money is secure, that there is compliance around it all that. So that’s one major bucket.”
“The other bucket is just functionality wise, where you see subscription management. It’s just something that was kind of new a year ago, like why can’t the bank help me analyze what I’m subscribed to?”, he said.
“The third, and that’s probably the most interesting bucket, is actually the bucket of ‘How do I, as a financial institution, how can I be there for the customer?'”
With the addition of Backbase’s Engagement Banking Platform into Microsoft’s Financial Services cloud, all of these needs can now be met. Financial institutions can also now integrate into Microsoft’s team performance ecosystems, and power core banking functions with Azure’s cloud capabilities.
In other recent fintech news, Klarna launched a Pay-in-4 subscription service in the US. Pipe and AngelList also partnered in an attempt to advance management fees for startups.