New FinTech entrants fall into two categories:

Disruptors

These organizations compete directly with the banks, offering loans, wealth, and banking solutions outside of traditional channels. The biggest potential disruptor has not yet even come into play.   Amazon, the most feared of all web based retailers, and the pioneer of the simplest buying experience, is the player who could have huge impact should they enter personal financial markets.

Enablers

Enablers, on the other hand, provide new technology to existing institutions, accelerating their digital transformation and arming them to compete with disruptor upstarts.

Three factors put FinTechs on a collision course with traditional banks.

1. Financial Service Institutions (FSIs) are under siege from the disruptors like Fundera with small business loans and Everbank for personal deposits that offer convenience, high levels of service, and low cost of doing business.
2. At the same time, consumers expect ever increasing levels of convenience, anytime/anywhere access, and simplicity of their banking experience. This is where FinTech’s shine, and where tradition banking processes are necessarily slow to keep up.
3. The millennial generation target is the prime new business opportunity, and millenial comfort and fixation with mobile devices means banking must be offered with mobile convenience.

The result is that traditional banks will need the help of FinTech Enablers to offer the same convenience, features and mobile service that the FinTech Disruptors are bringing to market.

What does an Enabler do for a bank?   By adding services outside of the core banking process, an enabler can jump start a traditional bank and accelerate their customer-centric digital transformation, even if the main business model has not changed.   An example is digital customer acquisition.   A user engagement layer that allows consumers to apply for loans and deposit accounts on mobile devices, without changing the core banking systems, can bring a bank to market with new digital offerings in far shorter a time than a complete digital overhaul of back office systems.

So the smart banks will realize the time-to-market is everything, and look to FinTech enablers as a source of agility.   In this context, agility means offering customers the mobile digital services they demand, tailoring to very specific target markets, and doing it in weeks or months, not 2-4 year cycles.   Agility means rapidly adapting to the desires of the market, measuring results, and adjusting.   And reality shows that FinTech specialists can do this faster and more effectively for banks than the banks can do it themselves.

Since the 2008 recession, lending regulations have increased dramatically, with almost 1,000 compliance changes implemented during the last eight years. Greater scrutiny of regulatory compliance has made it difficult to keep loan production costs in check. According to the Mortgage Bankers Association, the combination of increasing regulations and manual efforts to ensure compliance, have resulted in U.S. mortgage origination costs that are three times higher than they were a decade ago.

But your customers have little patience for the laundry list of regulations or the increasing operational burdens that have lengthened loan turnaround times—they expect their loan applications to be processed and approved quickly and accurately. Delays lead to dissatisfaction and disengagement. When you consider that, on average, it now takes 45 days for a loan to be approved, you can see there is room for improvement.

Welcome to the New World in Mortgage Lending

But imagine if there was a brand new world in your mortgage operations:  a tool that could easily enhance your ability to provide efficient and error-free mortgage lending services; a way to automate those repetitive, time-consuming manual tasks that zap productivity in your operations.

What if your knowledge workers—freed from entering loan data manually into multiple systems and vendor sites, retyping communications for borrowers and loan officers, and separating and saving documents into repositories—could instead devote their time to better customer service and other high-value activities?

It’s a reality with robotic process automation…..

How to Put Intelligent Software Robots to Work

Although the term “robotic process automation” or RPA might evoke an image of a shiny metal robot stealing your chair and taking over your keyboard, it is actually a software-based solution. With RPA, an intelligent software robot is configured to perform tasks previously performed manually by a person. RPA software is best-suited to take over “swivel chair” processes, where employees read data from one screen and key it into another. RPA interacts with other software and computer systems just like a human employee would—except a robot can do the work faster and cheaper, with fewer errors. And they can work 24/7 without a coffee break.

Software robots can be deployed to quickly and efficiently handle various mortgage lending tasks, such as monitoring emails, pulling in data from various internal systems and reconciling data between enterprise content management and loan origination systems. The elimination of manual errors and rework helps reduce operational costs and a more streamlined quality control and verification process improves compliance.  Customers receive their loan offers faster and are much happier with their lending experience.

RPA also plays quite well with others. It does not disturb any of your underlying systems and scales easily. RPA technology integrates with your core banking applications, so there’s no need to rip and replace your existing infrastructure. Robots interact with external online services by simply interacting with these web site portals just like your bank employees are doing today.  And no coding is required: you can put robots to work in a matter of weeks, not months, to realize significant productivity and efficiency gains.

Realizing Your RPA Opportunity

Leveraging software robots can help you meet loan quality, compliance and cost challenges head on—and realize a faster time to revenue for your lending business.

Case in point: Union Bank leveraged RPA to significantly improve its loan processes, resulting in a reduction in turnaround time for digitizing loan documents from 15 to 5 days; automation of post-closing processes to streamline loan file auditing; and the migration of 800,000 documents to ECM systems in a matter of days, not months.

Ready to dig deeper into the many ways RPA can revolutionize your mortgage lending processes? For more insights on how RPA can help you deliver a swift and seamless experience that builds customer loyalty, download our e-Paper: Forecasting Your Future: How Financial Institutions Are Improving Operations: 3 Ways to Transform Your Business Using Robotic Process Automation.

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The banking industry continues to evolve, but the terminology used to describe the developments can sometimes be numbing.  Some of the financial services buzzwords that you have probably heard a lot in the past year include digitization, blockchain, platform, transformation, augmented, crypto currency, biometrics, omnichannel and most people’s favorite… disruption.

More than just buzzwords, many of these terms represent what many traditional bankers believe is changing the ecosystem of an entire industry. ‘Challenger Banks’, Fintech Startups and even large technology giants are positioning themselves to be at the center of this change, many times leveraging these terms as part of their mission statements.

But, if you just put down your virtual reality glasses and try to find the underlying market mechanism behind most of this new fintech terminology avalanche, the result is very profound. The “disruption” is often more of a “distraction”, with this distraction working to the advantage of the new market entrants.

The noise is often much louder than the reality in the marketplace. And, in the midst of this distraction, many banks are forgetting their marketplace advantages and are blaming their inactivity on fintechs. Instead of embracing the next shiny object, they resemble a ‘deer in the headlights.’

So, what are the five biggest distractions created in the new financial marketplace?

Distraction #1: It’s All About the Technology

At the end of the day, it is not about the technology. It is about what the technology creates. Bankers do not need to deeply understand the underlying technology to realize that the original rules of business remain the same. The banking industry needs creative and talented people who can synchronize new technology with banking’s business goals; because the new digital consumer needs faster, and more convenient mobile and online services. The majority of new business is not generated by physical interaction any more. Instead of bringing customers to the physical touch points, banking needs to merge a wide variety of financial and non-financial ecosystems to a secured and easy to use electronic marketplace on behalf of their current (and future) customer base. An enhanced consumer experience is the alpha and omega of new age banking … not the technology. Bankers need to do what they do best, with new tools and borderless opportunities, and without distractions.

Distraction #2: Consumers are Flocking to Fintechs

The fintech marketplace is full of monoliners, who have invented one or two savvy digital solutions to ease a pain, generated by the lack of modern user friendly financial services. But the majority lack a full range of financial services and even more lack scale. Many are losing market advantage because they do not have the capital or marketing savvy to achieve a vast customer base or they cannot keep the promises they made due to overly aggressive business plans ...

To read the rest of the article regarding the potential of Fintech to be a disruptor and/or a distraction,  go to the complete article here ...

The white paper can be downloaded from the External IT website:
http://info.externalit.com/not-all-clouds-are-equal-public-vs-private

""Cloud computing has fast become the 'new normal' in IT, but many professionals in wealth management have only a vague idea of what 'the cloud' actually is, and how the cloud can be leveraged across their organizations,"" said Sam Attias, Managing Director at External IT. ""The cloud can help wealth managers secure their firms' critical information and workflows, as well as optimize business processes for servicing clients. However, in a highly regulated industry like financial services, the use of the cloud requires robust management and oversight—and not all clouds are created equal in terms of how they are managed and delivered. We drafted this white paper to help wealth managers understand what is necessary to operate in the cloud, and how to identify the right approach before making the transition.""

The white paper analyzes the potential advantages, and drawbacks, of public and private cloud platforms for wealth management firms, as well as hybrid cloud solutions that seek to combine the cost-efficiency of public clouds with the customization, and greater security and compliance controls, of private clouds. The white paper also discusses the criteria that wealth managers should use to evaluate potential cloud service providers, including:

• Industry & Technical Expertise
• Security & Compliance Requirements
• Third-Party Validation & Accreditation
• Established Customer Base & References
• Support

About External IT and workplace wealth_
External IT provides workplace wealth_, a secure digital hub which enables financial services organizations to aggregate their IT—all their apps and data—in a centralized cloud where they can be secured and controlled, while giving employees the flexibility to access all their tools and information from any firm-approved device, anywhere.

workplace wealth_ can seamlessly integrate technology applications, and allows financial institutions and advisors to control them through single-sign-on access. RIAs and broker-dealers can deliver the workplace wealth_ solution to advisors and their clients using a software overlay, ensuring advisors can continue to meet cybersecurity and compliance challenges as they grow. For more information about workplace wealth_ and External IT, please visit www.externalit.com and follow us on Twitter at @externalit.