Challenges: User experience 

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Today, the competition in the financial services landscape is growing rapidly with entry from the non-banks. Small fintech companies are nibbling away at large financial institutions’ market share for their products and services. The major value proposition from fintech is top of the line end-to-end customer experience. 

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A small anecdote on this was during one of my recent business trips. I traveled from Austin, Texas and used my corporate business card perfectly fine for various expenses, such as Uber, restaurants and my hotel. But, upon my return when I reached Austin Bergstrom Airport and wanted to rent a cart, the system rejected my credit card and locked it from further use. Luckily, I was at the end of my trip, but it gave me a bad user experience and denied the merchant from having a new transaction. 

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Every year, billions of dollars of good transactions are denied against the merchants due to lack of intelligent automation systems to check fraudulent versus clean transactions correctly. The banks and major financial institutions have solid technology from various vendors, which traditionally focused on internal employee functions rather than customer experience. However, today’s tech savvy millennials need a very different user experience!

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With experienced baby boomer’s generation on their way to retirement and IT teams more burdened than ever with huge backlogs, there is no one to help the business unit users who really understand how their business functions and what a true customer experience should be like. Throwing a customer facing login page, or a registration portal in front of end users, does not fulfill the experience. The off-the-shelf products from many vendors do not satisfy the best user experience that can be delivered to end customers—a one-size-fits-all approach simply does not work. Every bank or financial institution wants to be unique in their value proposition and wants to be on the driving seat. Unfortunately for these aspiring financial institutions, bespoke development and customizations are going to be very costly and not replicable.

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The problem is exacerbated by the fact that many large banks and financial institutions have either bought specialized vendors’ siloed products for applications such as checking/savings account management, small business loans, auto financing or fraud detection applications. To provide a consistent user experience, end-to-end (E2E) solutions may need integration between different vendors’ systems. This creates a very disconnected experience—confusing customers, taking longer to build, maintain, upgrade and perform any additional enhancements that are needed encompassing multiple vendors’ products. 

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Strategy: Low-code Hyperautomation

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Low-code and no-code automation platforms have revolutionized the way business users and subject matter experts enhance the end-to-end customer experience. These platforms empower individuals to swiftly address complex issues by creating use cases themselves, all while avoiding the constraints of custom integration and long implementation and testing cycles. This approach not only accelerates problem-solving but also fosters a more agile and adaptable business environment.

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An illustrative example of the advantages of low-code automation can be seen when comparing it to the traditional approach for implementing fraud detection in payment systems. In the conventional banking system, the process often involves outsourcing the development of detection algorithms to third-party vendors. Any subsequent modifications or updates necessitate extensive discussions with vendors, integrators, and the initiation of new projects, leading to lengthy implementation and testing cycles.

With Waylay solution, low-code automation empowers business users and subject matter experts to implement, test and deploy new finance algorithms in record breaking time. Furthermore, it allows for real-time adjustments and fine-tuning of AI and ML models without requiring any changes to the underlying business logic.

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Solution: Automation Platform

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Waylay’s low-code horizontal automation platform is cloud agnostic and built from the ground up with security and scalability in mind. Combining the power of a high-performance rules engine that can work on streaming data, as well as contextual data from multiple IT and financial systems, making decisions when to apply AI/ML algorithms verus as to when to apply rules creates a balanced high performing solution with reduced false positives. Waylay’s low-code automation solution can also run in a hybrid mode where a subset of the rules are pushed to the edge for low-latency computations of local data and higher privacy and security governed by the local laws. Business units in financial institutions will get significant acceleration in their immediate roadmap execution, mid-to-long term strategy and go-to-market with Waylay’s low-code automation platform.

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