Banking technology: striking the right balance of configuration capability
Why do so many financial institutions aspire to 100% configurable technology? In our experience, it’s the appeal of maintaining ownership over their platform and the promise of cost savings. But going down that path may actually end up costing more and putting an unbearable maintenance burden on the business.
Here we draw from the combined wisdom of four Sandstone Technology executives, as they shed light on the realities of configuration management in banking systems.
What do we mean by configurability?
When Sandstone delivers our clients banking self-configuration, we’re giving their employees the ability to make changes in their technology platform, often customer-facing changes. The features we develop depend on the institution’s operational workflows, their business rules and requirements, and the way they interpret banking regulations.
“One high-impact use case would be interest rates in lending. Our Configuration Manager tool allows bank employees to go into the backend and publish the new rate as it gets pushed out, without having to rely on us to do it for them. In effect, we’re giving them self-service tools.”
- Sandstone's Chief Customer Officer, Jen Harris
It’s a critical differentiator, given every hour or day of delay is costing the bank potential earnings from an increase in rates. On the flip side, when interest rates come down, the ability to move quickly can provide a competitive advantage in the market with price-sensitive customers.
Other use cases include new product releases, fee changes and regulatory updates, including amendments to first home buyers’ grants. Serviceability buffers are another example. With the recent changes in interest rates, it is crucial the FI can make these adjustments in a timely manner. For every day a rate increase is delayed, can cost the FI hundreds of thousands of dollars based on their volumes.
Configurability for non-operational features
Text or images that appear on users’ screens as part of their digital banking experience can be updated by the bank.
According to Head of Client Portfolios, James Morrison, who regularly runs product demonstrations for Sandstone customers, “Bank staff can re-configure the tone of voice in copy, they can adjust branding, and re-skin the look and feel.” (Note that this is different to customer-facing configurability, or personalisation, which Sandstone also provides, enabling end users to do things like change their profile name, re-order their accounts using their app, etc.)
We often create modules that can be turned on and off as necessary. Within those modules, there may also be smaller subsets of features they want to be able to enable or disable. For example, the ability for consumers to reorder their accounts, change background images, or select quick links to make their overall customer experience not just more efficient, but highly personalised.
Clients can also instantly re-configure aspects of their workflow management including task assignment. This is useful in the scenario where staff are taking on new roles or helping other teams with busy workloads. As Sandstone’s Head of Business Development, Nam Vuong points out, “applications should work based on the structure of your teams, not the other way around. Because those structures can change over time, they need to be configurable.”
Who within the FI is usually making those changes?
Sandstone products are designed for a range of non-technical users. Marketing, sales or content marketing people can easily be trained to use our production systems and make branding changes. If it’s deemed too risky for those employees to make the changes, which is common in banking, then it’s typically IT staff doing the updates driven by the marketing or business teams.
Where interest rates are being changed, it’s usually the pricing/product team. When it comes to manipulating the serviceability calculators, credit risk teams will usually be responsible for changing the weightings for income, and the levels of expenses that are used for serviceability assessment rates, etc.
Importantly, the way Sandstone has set up our configuration tools means that changes made won’t result in outages in the customer platform. All the changes are codeless, so developers don’t need to be involved at all, and all are auditable and controlled, with strict permissions and tracking through an audit trail.
Read the full article here.
About Sandstone Technology
For more than 25 years Sandstone Technology has been innovating and evolving financial solutions for some of Australia and the world’s largest banks and financial institutions. From digital banking and digital onboarding to loan origination and AI-based data analysis, our scalable, robust, end-to-end solutions using a multi-channel approach helps our customers get to market faster.
