The REGTECH Book

Invention Versus Reinvention

By Natasha Kyprianides

Head of Omni-channel and Customer Experience, Hellenic Bank¹

Innovation within financial services by FinTechs seems to have brought about only a user experience breakthrough as yet, rather than a true industry disruption. Banks need to address commoditization through business model innovation, rather than maintaining a focus on tweaking existing technology and products to perfection. Let’s take Uber as a suitable example of a single company that has managed to disrupt an entire industry. The method rests on one principle: the application programming interface (API) economy.

APIs act as the messengers between systems to provide seamless, real-time communication amongst different applications. Furthermore, they allow companies to effortlessly and securely connect their services to build a better customer experience.

This is how Uber has managed to overlay its taxi booking software on Google maps. Making Uber’s services possible requires a lot of highly complex components to be arranged and integrated into an app. It would necessitate a great investment of time and budget to develop each of them from scratch. Specialized players can provide the functions of every one of these components and make them available to other companies via APIs.

Now, how can this correlate to banking? By choosing to take full advantage of the possibilities that the second Payment Services Directive (PSD2) opens up, banks will be able to effortlessly ...