For the OmniPayments team it’s been a very busy end to the year, 2018. If you have been following us on social media you will have seen how we took time out to celebrate the holidays up and down the western hemisphere and beyond. From Colombia to Chile and from Mexico to Puerto Rico, we made sure our customers and our team had an opportunity to not only celebrate a great year for OmniPayments but to enjoy the networking opportunities such occasions provide. Getting up in time for the next flight was a challenge at times for some members of our team, but it was well worth it.
A great time for OmniPayments? If you missed catching up with us at this year’s NonStop Technical Boot Camp (TBC) you would have missed the news about our users migrating to NonStop X, to leveraging our new OmniCloudX offering and piloting our own Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT) in support of Know Your Customer.
No sooner had these celebrations ended then we headed “down under” with visits to both Australia and New Zealand where we caught up with members of our business consulting team. We are working hard to meet customers’ needs even as there is little time being afforded to any of the OmniPayments team to relax as the payments solutions business continues to expand and embrace new opportunities. Clearly, the take up of smartphones and tablets proved to be an unstoppable force throughout 2018 and for 2019, it will be imperative for all payments solutions vendors to step up and meet the challenges that come with customers of all Financial Institutions (FIs) looking at how to better manage their money – and, in general, their interactions with FIs - as they look for better deals with much better terms in a marketplace that is being thrown wide open to every consumer.
Like many of our OmniPayments customers we were bombarded almost daily with updates on Open Banking. And like many of you, we are oftentimes left scratching our heads – Open Banking has been around for a good while now but it seems as though the CEOs at the helm of many financial institutions are only just becoming aware of this initiative. Expressed simply, Open Banking is all about externalizing traditional banking services, including applications, the database and in some ways even the metadata via APIs that give the customers of all FIs the ability to create, publish and manage the information not only for one account but for many accounts.
Traditionally, we have anchored our interaction on a single check account into which our salary was deposited and out of which we paid our bills, giving us a small amount of cash left over to live a little. But today, the FI users have multiple accounts across multiple FIs and they just love to shop for deals, be it an overdraft, a credit card finance rate or even a mortgage. It’s all about the customer experience and meeting the needs of every FI customer.
Open Banking, as is often stated, is all about finding the best product no matter with which FI or FIs we interact – ownership of customer information, as is also stated, is moving from FIs to their customers, enabling them to share their transaction and other data with third parties. That “app” on your smartphone from whomever you chose to interface will determine how you bank! As for the customer experience, at OmniPayments we believe that at a minimum, this should include online banking, a variety of mobile banking applications, an even richer selection of FinTech applications and even third party applications not normally associated with banking or any other similar FI.
Clearly, this plays well to audiences globally but here’s the catch – Open Banking will take on different forms in different GEOs. What’s taking in place across Europe will likely prove ineffective / un-deployable in America even as the priorities of both Europe and America might prove meaningless in Asia. There is a reason China’s ANT is the biggest FinTech and enjoys a market cap or $60billion – it already caters to one in five of the world’s population.
“As we look at 2019, we believe we are well architected and very well prepared to meet the challenges of Open Banking, no matter the marketplace. We have been approached by FIs several times about our APIs even as we took the steps to externalize functionality supported by OmniPayments,” said OmniPayments CEO, Yash Kapadia, during his visit to Sydney. “I believe the message we need to convey to all FIs is that our roadmaps for 2019 include an openness to cater for any requirements FIs may have for any service to be externalized and any API to be supported no matter the GEO – that’s just who we are and what we do best, and in a timely manner!”
In many ways, the work OmniPayments has done in support of its own OmniCloudX option for FIs, whereby they can run OmniPayments as SaaS, is a forerunner to how FIs in turn may want to configure their own in-house deployment of OmniPayments “and it’s already been discussed with some of our customers,” added Yash. Perhaps more importantly, and given all that we achieved in 2018, this past year proved not only a good year but has given us a platform for future success for both our customers and ourselves as it continues to meet the demands of all FIs.
If this is something that is of interest to any member of the NonStop community, particularly if they are committing to this revolution in the way users interact with FIs, then let us know as we would welcome any opportunity to discuss our roadmap with you at your convenience.
[Reposted from January 2019 issue of NonStop Insider]
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