“Banking is no longer somewhere you go, but something you do” as Brett King said way back in 2012. And it is very much in keeping to what we are seeing across the industry now. From people consciously and proactively reaching out to their financial institutions to contextual channels offering them products that meet their needs in the moment.  

Offering financial services at the right time and tailored to the individual is a major move forward that has been made a reality thanks to data analytics. Accelerated digital adoption and transformation, together with e-commerce, embedded finance, and the move towards a cash-less society are factors that have encouraged the process to take off.

At FTT Embedded Finance UK & Europe 2021, our rockstar panellists analysed the latest technologies behind the veil of banking and when launching financial products using API and BaaS. The discussion, moderated by Christophe Langlois, Global Marketing Lead, Fintech & Developer Ecosystem at FusionFabric.cloud Finastra, further explored the utilization of data to improve product personalization and strategies to adapt product in line with consumer behaviour through automation and machine learning.

Jamie Broadbent, Head of Digital, Innovation and Design at RBS International commented that the rise of embedded finance had certainly been a wake-up call: “We recognise that the future is the one enabled by APIs, and we are on a quest to become the bank of APIs.” Referring to Brett King’s quote, he added “We firmly believe that the bank will be in the channels where the customer is. Even if that may not be a channel that we have right now, we will achieve so by putting the bank wherever the consumer is going to be.”

Accordingly, Vilmos Lorincz, Managing Director, Data and Digital Products at Lloyds Banking Group added “It’s much more about how you interact and work with all those channels, which becomes a distribution question. Once you think about distribution, you want to re-think about product manufacturing that will be relevant to your end-to-end consumers.”

Niamh O’Brien, Senior Solution Architect at Fivetran emphasized that with the surge of embedded finance “There is actually a big opportunity for incumbent banks to use this technology to increase their footprint, increase the number of access points that they have to clients.” However, she added “The challenge is how to do that at scale and quickly enough to capitalize the opportunity”.

The panel additionally featured the importance of partnerships, especially when it comes to cloud technologies and SaaS providers.

Watch the full panel discussion below:

The next edition of FTT Embedded Finance & Super-Apps will take place in London on 13th May 2025 and live as part of the FTT Fintech Festival on 11th – 12th November 2024 at The Brewery, London. Save the dates!