If you haven’t heard the news Banks and Fintech companies are now best friends and making trends.
What started out as a somewhat harsh and competitive relationship is now maturing into incredibly successful banking partnerships that aim straight at both businesses and individuals’ needs with revenue generation at its core.
We read about banking partnerships every day, but rarely do we commit the time and effort to truly understand how they are reshaping the financial landscape.
How do fintech and banking partnerships work?
For starters, regulations can now be navigated in new and elegant ways: Banks have immense knowledge in what concerns regulations, which is why fintech companies can now find clever ways to enhance their reach.
Moreover, API access can now be granted to fintechs, meaning that their scalability is getting much better and their offerings can now travel far and wide.
Banks, on the other hand, get access to cutting edge technology, so any innovate solution that sprouts is immediately delivered while banks can better control costs in what concerns in-house tech.
Top 5 fintech banking partnerships
i2c and American Express
As delivery apps sprouted all across the globe, fintech companies started offering their own versions of debit and credit cards.
At the time both Visa and Mastercard were backing these while AMEX was finding itself lagging behind in what concerned fintech space.
As such, they set their sights on increasing their card spending in the fintech space and partnered up with i2c accomplish that goal.
With i2c features like Amex Offers, early access to tickets, and other AMEX perks were no longer strange to the crowds.
All in all, both parties are improving their brand reputations and broadening their customer base, making this banking partnership a clever marketing play as well.
N26 + Wise
German bank N26 and London-based Wise (formerly known as TransferWise) partnered up and gave their clients an elegant way of sending money abroad.
As such, with an N26 bank account, sending money became fast, way easier, and a much more reliable process.
The partnership made possible to send money (in any of the apps 38 featured currencies) with no fuss, low fees, and full transparency straight from your phone.
This experience revolutionized international transfers and goes to show how successful fintech and banking partnerships can be and how the financial landscape is shaping up to be seamless for the end-user.
Subaio + ABN AMRO
ABN AMRO is one of the largest banks in the Netherlands and by partnering up with Danish Fintech Subaio, these two companies found an elegant way of managing recurring payments.
Together, they have created Grip App, an incredible digital platform for recurring payment management which cuts down costs, generates revenue, and improves your clients’ overall happiness.
The white label subscription management feature is a godsend for users as it conveniently sets up a way that they can see what they’re spending, categorize it (both incoming and outgoing payments), aggregate and cancel subscriptions directly from the interface itself.
On the other side of the spectrum, algorithms can thoroughly analyze their user’s transactions, scour them for patterns (either amount spent, frequency, the merchant’s name, and so forth) and form groups of like-spending users. Accordingly, the algorithm is constantly learning and constantly improving itself.
Finicity and Mastercard
Mastercard’s plans of using data sharing tech and machine learning are well known. Their sights are set on enhancing account to account transfers’ performance.
Finicity was such a trustworthy partner that Mastercard eventually acquired it for $825 million in 2020 and has ever since rolled out many incredible features.
Mastercard has since used open banking with the goal of making ACH payments (automated clearing house ) much faster and predictable.
In the process, friction is removed (as less unsuccessful transactions happen) as many of the pain points are removed.
Mastercard’s two new features, Payment Success Indicator and Payment Routing Optimizer, are a clever way of raising successful payment completion rates while also reducing transaction costs as they leverage machine learning and predictive modeling.
IntraFI and Citigroup: bridging the gap
IntraFi is a brokered deposit company which launched Yankee Sweep in partnership with Citigroup.
Yankee Sweep is an elaborate service which allows for both corporate and institutional clients to easily be able to move their excess cash into foreign branches of US banks.
As Citi’s presence is widespread across the world, corporate clients might have a significant number of accounts in different countries.
With Yankee Sweep and a single Citigroup account, clients can now move their excess cash overseas quite easily.
Fintech and Banking partnership trends
If you are a close observer, you might have figured out where fintech partnerships and banking partnerships are heading.
It seems that there are 5 major areas which these partnerships tend to fall under.
Open Banking
If you’re familiar with the term API (Application Programming Interfaces) you probably understand how they allow for financial service providers, meaning third parties, to gain access to financial data.
API enabled platforms caused a major shift given the benefits they bring to the table to banks, fintechs, and the end users.
It’s a fact that Open Banking has been empowering consumers due to it providing them with clever new ways of managing their finances online.
Many platforms will reach out for consumer-permissioned bank insights to improve as smart data leads to better decision-making.
DeFi (Decentralized Finance)
Cryptocurrencies, Non-Fungible Tokens (NFTs), and blockchain tech aren’t going anywhere.
In fact, in a way, they were designed with banking and other financial activities in mind, meaning that down the line, these financial technologies are primed to be of use to banks and fintech companies one way or the other.
Cybersecurity
With technological advancements come cybersecurity flaws and in the age of Open Banking, privacy and security are of the utmost importance.
Moreover, both banks and fintech companies need to actively fight against fraud and find new ways to protect their clients’ data.
Sustainability and social responsibility
Demand is high for companies to shift towards greener products and services. Social and environmental responsibility means good governance and data analytics, AI, and other tech can help companies achieve those goals.
Banking as a Service (BaaS) Platforms
API tech is here to stay, and many banks are launching their own Banking-as-a-Service platforms.
Regulatory oversight is usually handled by the federal deposit insurance (FDIC), the Office of the Comptroller of Currency (OCC), the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB), and other state level entities.
Accordingly, and given the safety measures which are in place, API tech will likely see demand rise as BaaS is estimated to be a €7 trillion industry by the end of the decade.
Wrapping up: Should FinTech firms and banks collaborate?
Unquestionably. Collabs allow for banks and fintechs to reap the full benefits of innovative financial technologies while optimizing revenue sources by finding new avenues to explore.
The proposition is usually simple: banks who partnered with fintechs tend to leverage their agility while the latter will usually have scaling at the heart of their plan. Both financial institutions aim at generating revenue and competitive advantage in their own way.
Surely, customer experience stands to benefit from these often explosive partnerships within the financial services industry, but there are ample opportunities to do business and for your business.
Which bank has partnered with FinTech?
From Deutsche Bank to HSBC. From Citi to Chase. From pretty much any business bank to community banks. The list is endless.
What banking partnerships have shown over the last years is that banks are thinking with a different mindset, distancing themselves from the thought of being in an ivory tower.
And as these recent fintech-bank partnerships have come to show, given the right value proposition there will always be room for one more business partner.
