What open banking means for operations with FIS
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What
FIS is a Jacksonville, Florida-based multinational corporation offering financial products and services to over 20,000 clients. Founded in 1968, FIS is publicly traded on the New York Stock Exchange. The company facilitates approximately $9 trillion in transactions per year.
FIS has traditionally operated through three divisions: banking and payments, capital markets, and merchant services. It’s now launched a new division (led by its own president) that focuses on embedded finance, APIs, and platforms.
Why
According to John Stuckey, Senior Director, Product – Retail Solutions at FIS, this commitment to embedded finance and connectedness reflects FIS’s “very bullish” attitude to open banking and other integrated solutions. “It's where a lot of FIS’s funding dollars for innovation are going right now,” Stuckey said.
Stuckey said that, while open banking offers a suite of opportunities on the consumer side, those same infrastructural ideas are driving B2B demand for comprehensive solutions.
“As we've been talking to to our banking leaders and the sales team, they’ve said one of the most important requests they're getting from businesses today is how to leverage open standards to get a more holistic view of all of their financial accounts and transactions, not just the ones that sit at the one bank that FIS has been connected to,” Stuckey said. “How do we also leverage the open standards to see accounts that we have with other banks and bring those into a unified view?”
How
FIS has a unique advantage as a banking core provider; it has account, transaction, and user-level data that it can pull into a unified platform to generate insights. It also partners with an ecosystem of fintechs to leverage third-party data.
This integrated data can make a material difference to business operations. FIS can help businesses with their cash-flow management, integrating with their ERP system to deliver projections and actionable insights.
“Cash flow is really one of the biggest things that drives small businesses to fail, particularly if they're really small businesses,” Stuckey said. “If we can help them understand their cash flow better; sometimes it can be as simple as if they have a single view into all of their accounts regardless of institution, and the ability to freely and easily move money between them.”
FIS can also help companies access real-time credit through this unified information. FIS’s product, Business Insights, helps companies understand their cash flow, and offers a lending solution as needed to keep the business running. “You can only do some of those things if you start aggregating all of that data using APIs and open access,” Stuckey said.
Moving forward, Stuckey anticipates this same data to help companies understand whether they pay competitive rates for vendor services, and also help them with marketing and sales, identifying the most profitable and promising clients.
FIS is continuously looking for fintechs to work with, according to Stuckey, especially those with an eye for UX and with an innovative ethos. Partnering with FIS offers scale and expertise, as well as the security of tried-and-tested, cloud-native payments pipes. These partnerships help FIS leverage data and technology to deliver impactful ops-focused solutions, while also building out new products, like a platform-market for fintechs, turning financial data into meaningful business insights.
