The Importance of System Integration to Drive Core Banking Transformation

When you’re looking at solutions, what does ‘fully integrated’ really mean? Here are 7 things you need to know from Alacriti’s Vikas Manchanda, Senior Director of Product & Strategy.

1. When we talk about our solutions being “fully integrated”, what are we saying to the market?

From an Electronic Bill Presentment and Payment (EBPP) perspective, full integration means that we are able to pull members’ loan/bill information and post a payment to their billing accounts. Those integrations can be real-time or batch based depending on the back office systems we are integrating with. Having full integration creates a frictionless bill payment experience for the member. In addition, our integrations with select credit union core systems, such as Symitar Episys® can also facilitate any customizations that are required by the financial institution.

2. Why doesn’t every fintech company simply make it easy to integrate with their systems?

Without a flexible, modern platform, fintechs may have difficulty in quickly integrating with other systems. The flexibility that has been built into the core of our Orbipay platform gives us the freedom to make strategic integrations quickly without impacting either existing clients or compromising our architecture, uptime, or performance.

3. What are the benefits of going with a vendor that has a certified integration with your core system(s)?

Perhaps the biggest benefit is a frictionless bill payment experience for the consumer without having to make expensive, complex, time consuming infrastructure updates for the financial institution. It’s also a more efficient experience for the financial institution’s IT staff and leadership.

4. What impact does integration have on implementation?

Having a certified integration reduces time to market because no proprietary or custom integration development is needed. In addition, it reduces the client’s operational cost without compromising the bill pay functionality as they won't need to maintain any vendor-specific processes.

5. What is the downside of going with a vendor that does not have a certified integration with your system?

Going with a vendor that does not have a certified integration with your current solution can represent significantly greater costs in time, efficiency, and customer experience. Also, when there are system outages, it is extremely difficult to solve issues due to a complicated system of custom patches that would be required to make the solutions to work together.

6. It seems like the topic of core systems integration has become more popular than ever before. What could be causing this trend?

In the banking industry, financial institutions are moving towards fully digitizing their consumer platforms, commonly known as digital transformation, while also laying the groundwork for open banking. True digital transformation is only possible if all of the bank’s systems are horizontally integrated, so without an integration strategy, you can’t have an open banking strategy.

7. What is Alacriti’s integration strategy?

Alacriti built the Orbipay core with an open microservices-based modular architectural approach to integrations. This provides flexibility and a better foundation for innovation. With our industry-standard payment dataset and an API based solution to solve integration challenges, we have quickly partnered with various industry cores, digital front end experiences, and loan servicing platforms. We strive to create strategic partnerships that can make payments a stress free experience for all of our clients.