By Lloyd Parata, A/NZ Country Manager, BankiFi
Happy Lunar New Year and welcome to the Year of the Tiger. 🐅
The tiger is a courageous, energetic risk-taker. No matter what situation it finds itself in, the tiger always finds a smart and agile way. Much like a tech scale-up, such as BankiFi.
Banks on the other hand are prudent, steady and strong. Like the ox, which is the year we are farewelling.
So what happens when a tech scale-up partners with a bank? It’s a great question!
If that partner is BankiFi, the answer is that you get the best of both.
The new battlefront for the banks and the growing list of challengers
There’s a growing list of challengers lining up to lure clients away from banks, especially in small business banking.
Banking-as-a-Service allows non-bank providers to re-intermediate banks and re-skin banking products to their own brands.
Accounting package vendors like Quickbooks, ecommerce platforms like Shopify, and paytechs like Stripe all offer embedded finance experiences for their small business customers that include invoicing, payments and collections and even bank accounts. These non-bank providers are offering the convenience of doing more in the same channel.
Banks need to respond.
Rather than just being a place to make a payment or check an account balance, banks need to transform the banking channel into the go-to place to run a small business.
This delivers value for a business owner who benefits from the convenience of everything being in one place, including invoicing, bookkeeping, payments, collections and setting aside tax.
And this is what BankiFi delivers.
BankiFi’s technology suite – which can be white-labeled and is ready to go “out-of-the-box” – becomes an embedded workflow that delivers all the necessary banking and financial processing at the same time.
Using our platform, we enable banks to become customer-centric rather than product-centric, to increase revenues and reduce costs, while empowering business customers to thrive.
We call it embedded banking because the bank digital channel becomes a fully embedded workflow experience, rather than a transactional utility.
Embedded banking
Financial management has not traditionally been seen as part of the role a bank can play, and yet as business becomes increasingly more digital, and payments become almost exclusively electronic, all the information required to provide an accurate picture of a business’s finances derives from the bank account.
Since the advent of the smart phone boosted by cloud computing, it’s been a tough gig for banks to deliver a complete suite of best-in-class products that spans retail/consumer, SMB, corporate, institutional, and any other type of banking.
SMB banking has been the poor cousin, often making do with products designed for retail/consumer or corporate, that are decidedly not fit for purpose for SMBs.
SMBs are amazingly diverse with bespoke needs.
How BankiFi makes small business banking better
At BankiFi, we have identified that the best way to use technology to help SMBs with their bespoke financial needs is to reimagine the bank’s relationship with its business customers.
No longer is it simply about offering products. Instead, we embed banks within their customers’ daily workflows, enabling banks to offer value-added services embedded directly in the banking channel. And everything is designed around the workflows and processes that SMBs already use.
And what does this mean for your customers? By being able to run their business even better and automate manual tasks – all from within their digital banking service– they can spend more time on the things that matter to them.
This partnership approach delivers some big benefits for small business customers.
For example:
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BankiFi replaces the siloed approach to a bank's channel strategy with an API-first approach
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For payables, the entire ‘procure to pay’ process is embedded within the bank’s digital channel
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Likewise for receivables, the entire ‘order to cash’ process happens within the bank’s digital channel
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BankiFi enables banks to automate collections for their customers to solve the late payments problem and optimise cash flow, and
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BankiFi builds a live profile of the customer’s cash position
Why banks need to work with BankiFi
Banks need help to overcome siloed product-centric thinking and the deficits of legacy mainframe technology, especially in small business banking where late payments are a perpetual problem for businesses around the world.
BankiFi enables banks to automate collections for their customers, reducing late payment days and the associated admin burden – all from within the bank’s own digital channel.
The BankiFi platform helps banks acquire customers at the earliest and cheapest point in their business journey, by offering them the right services at the right time, such that they never need to look elsewhere.
This is what we mean at BankiFi when we say we put banks at the heart of businesses.
If you are an Australian, New Zealand or SE Asian bank interested to know more about BankiFi’s capabilities in the region, reach out using the contact form on the BankiFi website.
