Fintech’s Role in Building Open Ecosystems

How financial businesses of all sizes work together to promote infrastructural growth in the global digital economy.

The worldwide online marketplace is buzzing with activity and always on the search for new opportunities to grow and improve the lives of the people, financial institutions, and organizations who populate it. But how exactly do policymakers, financial institutions, businesses and Fintech companies (i.e. software and technology-based service providers that support the financial industry) coordinate their individual efforts towards creating value-based circular economies and integrating the latest digital solutions on a mass scale? It all starts with a common problem: complexity.

Making the Complex Simple

The presence of complexity provides organizations that have an innovation-mindset with a huge amount of opportunity. In their search to simplify bloated or inefficient processes, they’re also racing to build out custom solutions that offer faster, safer, more secure and increasingly convenient transactions for end-users everywhere. While each country may be making steady progress towards investing in their own data infrastructure, the gains are also seen across borders as financial solutions become multicurrency, multijurisdictional, always-on, 24/7 services that work in favor of their customer base.

As Janet Young, Head of Group Channels and Digitalization of United Overseas Bank states, “open innovation is really about giving value to customers and assuring that their needs are being addressed. At UOB, we look to the customer to help us find the most sought-after APIs to pursue so we can, in turn, empower individuals to run their businesses more efficiently and make things easy for them.”

In this way, building open ecosystems starts by enabling businesses both big and small to connect via the APIs that bring users the most value. That’s a big reason why financial institutions take the promotion of digital partnerships very seriously since they have the potential to solve mutual problems, aggregate ecommerce and community activities, and build out joint infrastructure organically.

Market Participation as the Ultimate Goal

Another reason why fintechs and financial institutions wage war against complexity is that it stops many merchants, individuals, organizations and institutions from participating in the financial market to the fullest extent. By finding out what people want on a micro-level, the solutions can be built on a macro scale to bring maximum value to all the parties involved. Big or small, the addition of each new connection to the ecosystem brings the entire infrastructure that much closer to a form of true global connectivity beyond what governments or banking companies can achieve on their own.

Fintech Startups like Rapyd Enable Change and Growth

As a platform player, Rapyd localizes payments to provide a seamless, “invisible” layer that other organizations, in turn, can integrate into their processes and build out a customer-centric, locally-compliant and intelligent experience that manages risk, brings funds into the system, collects money and redistributes it to the economy. “We see a world in which a very large expansion of proprietary networks starts to mix and match, which is a lot of noise for a typical business to make sense of. We simplify the cacophony so people can focus on the needs of their customers and the specific use-cases that are relevant to them,” says Joel Yarbrough, Rapyd Asia-Pacific VP.

And that’s how global financial ecosystems are built: brick by brick via the “right” combination of the best API partnerships and synergy opportunities.

For a more in-depth analysis and discussion on this topic, watch this video from the 2020 Singapore Fintech Festival discussion panel.