FutureBank selected for Mastercard Start Path program

Source: TechCentral

Open banking and payments technology specialist FutureBank has been selected to participate in Mastercard Start Path’s New Networks program. The company, which provides financial institutions with a platform that simplifies the integration between core banking and modern fintech, is one of eight companies joining the new Mastercard cohort announced on 6 February.

“This new opportunity will allow us to accelerate innovation, scale our solutions more effectively and help us play a role in shaping the future of digital banking and financial services alongside Mastercard,” said Sergio Barbosa, CEO of FutureBank.

Mastercard Start Path’s New Networks program offers participating companies with resources, mentorship and access to Mastercard’s vast ecosystem to help support growth and innovation in the competitive fintech landscape.

Since it was founded in 2014, Start Path’s portfolio has grown to more than 450 start-ups from over 60 countries.

“As the fintech landscape continues to evolve at a rapid pace, Mastercard is embracing opportunities to support and collaborate with start-ups to build the future of innovation through the Start Path New Networks program,” said Sabrina Tharani, senior vice president of global fintech programs at Mastercard.

“Mastercard has selected FutureBank to join its ecosystem of innovators and will provide opportunities to access its network of partners, mentorship opportunities and resources to support their scaling journey.”

Democratising financial services

Mastercard carefully selected each start-up during a competitive application and vetting process for their innovative solutions that utilise open banking and open principles, as well as their strategic alignment with democratising financial services.

The New Networks program within Mastercard Start Path is designed to support fintechs to scale and power experiences that enable consumer choice.

Symbiotic relationship

“We know that banks struggle to adopt new innovative product offerings without causing significant disruption to both the banking operations and the customer experience. We can solve these challenges for them,” explained Barbosa.

Legacy banks running core systems are facing growing challenges as the more agile neobanks snap at their heels.

Research from McKinsey found that operating costs for banks still running outdated cores averaged 10x higher than those with next-generation core systems. What’s more, the IDC warns that the cost of delaying migration is also growing, saying banks that fail to migrate to a future-ready platform can potentially miss out on a 42% increase in additional payments revenue and savings on legacy costs of up to 21% annually.

“FutureBank has always viewed the banking and payments technology landscape as unnecessarily complex. Banks and fintechs are often tied to core banking systems, keeping them from new product innovations and digital transformation,” said Barbosa.

“We believe banking and payments should be 100% plug-and-play. Collaborative partnerships, like those nurtured through the Mastercard ecosystem, takes us a step closer to a future where this is possible.”

FutureBank CEO Sergio Barbosa and Global Kinetic COO Lorén Rose

Solving the software integration challenge, FinTech's last mile

Sergio Barbosa, CEO, FutureBank

Co-founder and CIO of enterprise software development house, Global Kinetic, Sergio directly heads its open banking platform, FutureBank. A skilled software engineer, innovative product developer, and keen business strategist, he has participated in several notable fintech milestones, including building the southern hemisphere’s first digital-only bank all the way back in 2002.

Eyes on fintech's last mile

Many of the banks and credit unions that we speak to are no less “progressive” than their tier-one peers when it comes to recognizing the potential of platform banking or banking-as-a-service. They just don’t have the same budgets to spend on new talent, in-house innovation hubs, and large-scale partner programs.

You’ve got to spend money to make money though, right? That’s where fintechs can help by providing banks with reasonably priced know-how and out-of-the-box financial services developed with an entirely new focus on the digital end customer.

There are new sources of revenue to be gained in both directions, of course. My focus in this blog post is, however, not on the opportunities for value creation and exchange in bank–fintech partnerships – as central as that topic is to everything we do at FutureBank. Today, I want to look at a common hurdle for fintechs getting to that point: software integration. It’s fintech’s last mile.

Software integration: Here be monsters

The promise of a stress-free go-live – “fast go-to-market”, “rapid ROI”! – typically features in every piece of fintech marketing material, with assurances based on the modern, lightweight deployment model and excellent APIs. Things tend to run differently in reality, however, and fintechs often find themselves spread thin when integrating their technology at the bank.

Implementation teams are usually ignorant of what they will find at the client. Even smaller banks have many moving parts, constituencies, and the various systems they use are technologically complex and interface in unpredictable ways. The scale of banks’ regulatory burden, especially as it pertains to digital security and risk management, is also something few fintechs really understand, despite it being a factor in nearly every answer banks give to questions fintechs ask.

When the inevitable complications arise during integration, time is lost and costs – all the fintech’s own – pile up. Progress updates may remain cordial, but the project draws senior staff away from other important aspects of their business, including landing the next sale and building the next killer feature of their product.

Sound familiar?

Solving the software integration problem for fintechs and their customers

As enterprise software integration experts of long-standing, my colleagues and I at Global Kinetic have seen this dynamic – or something like it – in play many times. Knowing the nature of the beast ahead of time would help providers plan and act with speed and precision, freeing them sooner to return to what they enjoy doing most.

That’s why we built FutureBank, a banking-as-a-service platform that integrates into the world’s most widely deployed core banking systems. It provides fintechs with a fully kitted-out digital banking sandbox for testing their software integrations against these and helps determine the level of custom work required for non-standard or customized versions out there.

Flipped 180 degrees, FutureBank becomes a fintech marketplace where banks and credit unions are able to discover, test, and deploy pre-integrated third-party products and services at low cost, with considerably less risk than they would before. We have many products on the platform, and we onboard new providers every month.

What is the experience like for our fintech customers? I’ll describe a couple of case studies in future blog posts.

Partnerships are the lifeblood of open banking. Contact FutureBank to discover how we can help you work better together.

Read our previous post here: Regional banks have a big opportunity in open banking