BANK PLATFORM SOFTWARE Incumbent financial institutions today cannot ignore the importance of integrating innovative solutions within their services. To keep pace with fintech developments, a majority of them have set digital transformation as their top priority for the near future. Driven by the increasingly sharp competition caused by innovative players offering new services and a tailored customer experience, the banking industry is opening up to a whole new segment of stakeholders, creating a new and dynamic playing field. Besides that we see that software platforms are becoming increasingly important as enablers of new services, also for banks. Indeed many tech-related firms are entering the banking sector, as traditional banks are compelled to share their customer data in specific regions. Regulators are actively stimulating this shift, as we saw lately at a European level with the implementation of PSD2, aiming to shape a more 190
competitive field where the customer is placed at the center. This opening up of the banking sector is drastically changing the way stakeholders interact. As a result, traditional bank-customer relationships are being put to the test. New, tech-driven fintechs are identifying areas in the banking value chain that are often high margin and have large need for improvement. Banking service providers need to cope with higher customer expectations, innovation, new regulations. But banks find that their core legacy systems are getting in the way of making the necessary adoptions.