Adopting a new mindset: why a platform approach makes sense for treasury departments

The unpredictability of the global economy and growing competition means there is no longer a choice about whether or not banks build digitization into their short to medium-term strategies.

They need to innovate and provide customers with a new level of service and products, whilst continuing to use resilient core systems and at the same time, identify a way to transition to the cloud.

In parallel, the pace of change means keeping innovation completely in-house is difficult, if not impossible.

The way banks buy and manage technology has changed. Instead of buying software and maintaining it themselves, they can rely on their software developer to keep capabilities and functionality up to date, whilst also including support for fast-moving regulatory compliance requirements.

Rather than logging in and out of separate systems, users can access one platform where all of the applications they need are accessible and orchestrated. There are no dependencies that require costly and regular reprogramming if something changes, or new apps are needed. Everything is handled by the software platform provider, which exists only for this purpose.

Benefits of the cloud

This is where the Finastra Treasury as a Service platform comes into its own. The platform operates in the cloud, just like Microsoft 365, which means a bank can focus on the things that a bank is good at, rather than spending time and money on IT maintenance.

Just as a bank would tell a business to concentrate on its core activities and let them, the bank, look after payments or trading, we tell our customers to leave it to us to provide the technology that enables them to operate successfully.

Banks’ cost of IT ownership can be reduced by around two-thirds through investing in an open platform. Platform providers are in the best possible position to deliver the levels of service that customers want to see, whether that’s providing better products, new data insights or stronger interest rates.

Part of that investment is in cloud-based software as a service. Some banks continue to have concerns about security when transitioning from in-house servers to the cloud, but the partners that we work with provide the most secure technology on the planet.

In fact, some of the outages that we have seen in recent times, that result in customers being locked out of their accounts for weeks on end, have been experienced by banks still running legacy systems.

As well as providing a more resilient and reliable service to customers, a platform approach opens the way up for banks to add new functionality to the systems they run with minimal effort. Accessing a marketplace or ecosystem of tried and tested applications and functionality is a great way to move forward with new services.

Joining the ecosystem

One of the other great outcomes for our customers is that they become part of this ecosystem, along with our partners. They are not just users but a connected piece of the puzzle.

With a platform approach like FusionFabric.cloud banks get the best of both worlds: a reliable core system and access to an ecosystem of apps and functionality that add value not just to their businesses, but to their customers’ operations as well.

As we look forward to the future it’s clear that many of the disruptive forces that we are experiencing today are only going to continue. Global conflict, energy shortages and rising prices are not going to be resolved any time soon - and will require high levels of human ingenuity to find solutions that hold.