Building the Connected Bank: Why Collaboration and Orchestration are Key to Succeeding with Open Banking

Open Banking is fundamentally changing how financial institutions create value. The trends and opportunities require a technology-enabled business model that allows financial institutions to expose their customer data to third-party developers through secure application programming interfaces (APIs). If you’ve ever used CashApp or Venmo to make payments, you’ve benefitted from the type of seamless, connected customer experiences made possible by Open Banking frameworks.

Traditional banks see Open Banking as an opportunity to collaborate to grow market share, improve customer loyalty, and create new revenue streams. But to achieve those goals, the C-suite and other executives need help breaking down the operational silos that prevent innovation, growth, and successful programs.

Industry experts like Deloitte suggest that “any financial services firm wishing to participate successfully in this new environment will need to go through a radical review of its long-term strategy, as well as its technological and operational capabilities.”

Complexity and misalignment are holding banks back

Years of digital upgrades have created a tangled technological landscape that siloed core banking operations. What began as well-intentioned efforts to modernize legacy systems resulted in a complex network of legacy, bespoke, and modern systems that trap data in silos and don’t communicate effectively with each other. This technological maze makes it difficult for banks to beagile in a volatile market.

Even after decades of digital transformation upgrades, many banks still struggle to unify customer account data and coordinate processes from end to end within their own systems, let alone a third party. Banks eager to expand into Open Banking need to untangle their digital knots and reimagine how technology can truly support—rather than complicate—their business goals.

Complicating things further is the misalignment between business and IT teams. Getting everyone on the same page within such a complicated and interconnected tech ecosystem slows banks down and can even result in rolling out the wrong features to customers. According to a recent study of 800 IT and business decision-makers, 82% say miscommunication between teams leads to the wrong thing being built. Process orchestration can help simplify system complexity, improve collaboration between business and IT teams, and unlock the right Open Banking opportunities.

Unite strategy and execution with process orchestration

Process orchestration is designed to coordinate diverse technologies and tie together your most critical—and often complex—business processes. It plays a pivotal role in connecting, automating, and optimizing Open Banking workflows because it can orchestrate moving parts from end-to-end across disparate systems, people, and third parties.

As digital demands increase, having a scalable and flexible platform as your foundation will be crucial to achieving your transformation goals. It will enable you to turn strategic vision into operational reality while being able to maximize the investments you’ve made in technology and teams.

Banks are using process orchestration to drive key Open Banking capabilities, including:

• Strategic partnerships and differentiation: Process orchestration helps to bring together the diverse financial ecosystem. By securely connecting and opening up your core banking systems to third parties, you can forge profitable new partnerships with fintech and non-financial firms that help expand your market share and add new revenue streams.
• Operational excellence and resilience: High-quality, timely data fuels Open Banking and other innovation initiatives. Process orchestration helps ensure accurate, real-time data sharing across platforms with complete visibility from end to end. Not only does this improve risk management and compliance oversight, it also helps you find areas for optimization—whether for cost reductions or to improve customer satisfaction scores. Ultimately, you’re able to create and ship new products and deliver better experiences for your customers and the employees who serve them.
• Future readiness and agility: Process orchestration provides a platform for agility required by any forward-looking bank. The inherent composability enables you to reuse and modify process components to improve standardization and speed up deployment cycles. Whether you’re expanding into new markets, taking advantage of new technology, or launching new value-added services for your customers, the platform ensures you can move faster with lower risks.

Most important, process orchestration provides a foundation for the flexibility required to navigate a dynamic global market where customer demands, emerging technology, and regulatory requirements are constantly shifting. Ultimately, it helps banks unite their strategic vision with their technical reality so they can get the most value from their investments and deliver unique, differentiated services and products faster.

BNY is an example of a long-established bank that uses process orchestration and automation to enable Open Banking capabilities. For example, their client-facing SaaS data platform (Data Vault) gives clients the ability to access data and analytics from a multi-tenant, public, cloud-based application. The platform is designed to ingest structured and unstructured data from multiple sources such as vendors, clients, order management systems, and accounting platforms by streaming, sharing, or batch processing and then transform it. A data virtualization layer allows clients to query across multiple data stores. The Data Vault platform uses a microservices architecture to securely expose different services with which clients can build an application or feature. Process orchestration is the capability that makes it possible for BNY to coordinate and automate all of the platform’s services for multiple, simultaneous users.

Future-proofing Open Banking ecosystems with process orchestration and automation

As banks undertake more Open Banking initiatives, they will face increased demands, new compliance standards, and expanding partner ecosystems. Process orchestration can help banks adapt to these changes by fostering agility and resilience. That’s why CIOs and CTOs consider process orchestration a critical investment to stay competitive in the Open Banking era and why they are choosing Camunda’s universal platform for process orchestration and automation as the orchestration and automation layer in their Open Banking frameworks.

Camunda is designed to integrate and scale to meet business and performance needs. The open, standards-based platform bridges business, IT, and third-party providers to collaboratively build unique, tailored experiences that customers demand. Its composability enables teams to design once and reuse process models, decision tables, Connectors, and other components in multiple ways. These capabilities help banks speed time-to-value and innovate without compromising on quality or control.

Building a connected, customer-centric future in Open Banking

The next era of banking will be defined by Open Banking. As Deloitte experts see it, “There is little doubt that markets believe that Open Banking, closely followed by a broader cross-industry data sharing ecosystem, is the way forward.”

Traditional banks can compete with fintechs and neobanks in this new era if they can modernize and transform their internal systems to be engines for growth. Banks that succeed will not be defined by their traditional assets but by their ability to rapidly adapt, integrate, and innovate. They will be the ones that build agile, interconnected financial ecosystems that can pivot instantly to changing market demands and customer expectations.

Learn how Camunda can help your institution scale innovation in banking and financial services. Schedule a custom demo today.