How Can You Ensure Your Fintech Is Future-Proof?
With the threat of Brexit, and the changing regulatory environment, fintechs that are looking to expand their offering in the future are having to deal with constant challenges.
As outlined in previous blog posts, there are ways around these challenges, but how should your fintech plan for future challenges?
Here are three ways we think you can do this.
1.) Having An Expandable Offering:
As we looked at in one of our recent posts, pre-paid cards are a popular initial solution for Challenger Banks wanting to increase their speed to market.
They do, however, present significant challenges as you look to progress your business and expand your offering.
By investing in an overall account management platform during the early stages of your development you will be able to deal with most potential technological advancements as your business grows.
2.) Having A Flexible Platform:
Since the financial crisis of 2008, governments and industry regulators have been keen to ensure the same mistakes aren’t repeated.
There has been a flurry of financial regulation since the crisis, with the most recent pieces being the Second Payment Services Directive (PSD2) and the Fourth Anti-Money Laundering Directive (AML4).
While recent news indicates that it’s likely there won’t be any new regulations in the financial services industry for some time, it’s still important to ensure your fintech platform is ready and flexible enough to deal with any potential regulations that do come into force.
For example, the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), which is due to come into force in May 2018 will affect most businesses, including financial institutions. Is your fintech ready?
3.) Having A Strong Infrastructure:
Having a flexible platform to be able to react to new pieces of regulation is important, but so is your ability to deal with financial crime and cyber security.
Your platform could be the most user-friendly and cost-effective product on the market, you could even bring your product to market quicker than all your competitors, but if your security or infrastructure is found wanting, you will get caught out.
The larger financial institutions will often have large teams just to monitor and deal with cyber security issues.
For challenger banks and fintech start-ups however, the story is a whole lot different. That’s why, when you are looking at a platform on which to base your business, you need to think carefully about the limits and expertise of your staff, as well as your financial constraints.
If you decide to buy a ready-made base platform your provider will usually have an in-house team dealing with cyber security.
When looking at the above solutions you will need to be aware of the development costs, both at the early stages and the final stages.
It’s a choice between building your own bespoke platform which will be unique to others, or buying a ready-made, proven, base platform which can be customised to your own business model.
Whether you are going to build or buy your base platform, you need to understand the facts about both.
Trusek’s offering of a fully-fledged account management platform, and our team’s vast experience in the fintech sector, will afford you the peace of mind, and the stability, to ensure your business succeeds.
If you are looking to hear more about how a built, but bespoke, backend platform can help your business, email us at hello@trusek.com or call us on 020 7048 0470.