DIGITAL TRANSFORMATION
Competition isn’t the enemy; mediocrity is. And innovation is the cure. That could summarise the view of the man heading up Avaloq.one, the platform bringing banks and wealth managers together with fintechs to create fast, powerful solutions to real-world bankers’ problems.
Anders Christensen used to sit in a banker’s chair. He knows how complex things can get; and with complexity comes delay – and cost. “We’ve all seen the proofs of concept dying deaths after 18 months of trying to create something. Avaloq wanted to change that,” he says. “We wanted to not only speed it up, but do it in a way that you can scale.
The
door is now ‘open’ open’ The Avaloq.one platform has seen increased demand from all parts of the banking and wealth management industry as fintechs and institutions address issues exaggerated by the pandemic. Heading up the platform is Anders Christensen, who believes the API-first approach will lead inevitably to ‘open’ finance
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And we wanted to do it with impact.” And so, Avaloq.one was born in April 2019: an ecosystem whose lifeblood is application programme interfaces (APIs). “I think everyone is interested in the one thing none of us has, and that’s time,” says Christensen. “Everyone wants to innovate faster. So, if you can now do 100 steps in 50 and you can scale it to five fintechs instead of one, potentially deploy it to your other geographical locations very quickly… all these things help everyone.” It would be disingenuous if Avaloq’s own internal onboarding and development timescales weren’t constantly being challenged themselves – and they are. “It used to take us three to six months to onboard a fintech to the Avaloq platform. Now we’re down to two weeks with a standard contract of five pages, which gives you a lot of the screening, scouting, onboarding, commercialisation – and it’s browsable, for everyone to see. That leads into the scale argument, which is really about technology off the shelf. We have many different types of APIs and with AMI Web Services that all comes together and connects the Avaloq platform, securely and safely. In the future we will also be able to measure the data flow from it, to any third-party provider.”
The world’s ‘fintech finest’ Avaloq, the Switzerland-based digital banking specialist, offers powerful Cloud based core banking and wealth management technology to clients worldwide. In Switzerland alone, it hosts 35 banks in the Cloud. Around the world, it has four service centres offering business processes as service (BPaaS) and software as a service (SaaS) operations, handling the back office as well as frontend solutions for several of the world’s top wealth managers and private banks. But by 2019 it was becoming increasingly obvious that the infrastructure on which these institutions ran could not respond fast enough to keep up with services from emerging neo banks and other financial services providers. So, Avaloq.one was launched as a platform to which fintechs could self-onboard and self-integrate with open APIs and access to sandbox capabilities.
www.fintech.finance