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How Open Banking is Revolutionizing the Financial Services Industry

“Open banking” is an initiative first launched by banking regulators in the U.K. in 2018. Major banks in the U.K. were given one year to create open interfaces between their retail (i.e., individual) and commercial (i.e., business) customers’ banking accounts and payment systems in order to make it easier to share financial information across banks, Fintechs, and third-party providers (TPPs). Leveraging APIs, authorized Fintechs and TPPs can view and analyze banking customer data (e.g., expense patterns, loan history, etc.) and then use various technology levers to present these customers with tailored financial products.

The ultimate goal of this initiative is to ease financial information sharing among financial stakeholders (with the client’s consent) and to encourage banks to collaborate with Fintechs and TPPs instead of competing with them.

Global Adoption

Since its launch on January 13, 2018, open banking has been rapidly adopted across the U.K.:

  • 300 Fintechs and innovative providers have joined the ecosystem1
  • 2.5+ million U.K. consumers and businesses now use open banking-enabled products1
  • Every month, hundreds of thousands of U.K. consumers and businesses become new active open banking users1
  • API call volume has increased from 66.8 million in 2018 to nearly 6 billion in 20201

Now global markets beyond the U.K. are beginning to adopt open banking. Not only will it lead to faster financial services innovation, it will also open up competition — leading to a transparent financial market and enabling clients to make the right decision at the right time for their financial goals. This step further reduces the barrier of entry for the neo banks, Fintechs, and startups to enter the banking industry — along with getting the incumbent banks to modernize their infrastructure to address the new era of banking.

Of course, in order to successfully implement open banking and create a seamlessly functioning ecosystem, the right stakeholder and technology levers must be in-place and in-sync. In the next two sections, I will briefly describe each of these moving pieces.

Ecosystem Players

Banking Regulators

In the U.K., the open banking initiative is overseen by the Open Banking Implementation Entity (OBIE); governed by the Competitions and Market Authority (CMA); and funded by the U.K.’s nine largest banks and building societies3. In other countries like the U.S., China, Singapore, Australia, and Canada, regulators act as the primary stakeholder to normalize open banking and enable a safe and secure setup for banking customers.

Major Banks & TPPs/FinTechs

Open banking has got off to a good start with major banks, and I expect the trend to continue growing since it provides a much more open playing field for ecosystem partners to operate and collaborate for customer engagements. For example, BBVA has launched a BaaS platform called Open Platform; HSBC has launched a Connected Money app; and Barclays has enabled account aggregation inside its mobile banking app2. On the other end, TPPs and Fintechs are trying to leverage various technologies like artificial intelligence, machine learning, and big data to proactively offer customized solutions for clients.

Retail & SMB Banking Customers

Open banking also benefits banking customers (retail, SMB and commercial) customers by providing them with access to multiple personal finance management (PFMs) tools/vendors and a consolidated interface for financial transactions. Of course, the customer has sole authority over their financial data. Customers must authorize their bank to share their data with TPPs and Fintechs, and they can decide how long a TPP or Fintech has access to their data. The customer gets to choose banking products per their needs — whether that’s a product from their incumbent bank or a TPP/Fintech — and their private banking credentials cannot be disclosed, stored, or retained.

Technology Levers

Banking API

To achieve the level of transparency and security required for open banking, banks must update their legacy infrastructures to support open APIs, which is what enables TPPs and FinTechs to view and analyze the banks’ client account information. As mentioned earlier, banks must first get permission from their customers about how to manage their information. In return, the banks use various tools and technologies to monitor customer data and leverage it to enhance their offerings across loans, insurance, financial services, etc.

 Data Privacy and Security

Data privacy and security are the most important tenets of open banking. Financial regulators have deliberated data privacy and security heavily, which can change depending on the geography and banking standards.  Banking clients must be able to trust that banks will share only what they want, for how long they want, with authorized TPPs and FinTechs who will also protect their information. They must also feel secure that their data will not be leaked through hacks or leaks during the transmission between banks and TPPs/FinTechs, which is why these institutions must harden their security measures by using various steps like data encryption, no retention policies, system firewalls, etc.

Conclusion

GlobalLogic has been working within the BFSI industry for over 15 years, helping financial services institutions of all types adopt digital transformation, from UX and architecture advisory to full-service product engineering. Our expertise includes:

  • Open banking & PSD/2 implementation
  • Enterprise application integration
  • API management programs
  • Architecture assessment & reference (API & integration)
  • iPaaS advisory & implementation
  • Master data management & synchronization across the enterprise
  • Business process & workflow automation
  • Cloud & on-premise platforms

Based on this experience, I expect that open banking will continue to evolve with new standards and measures as countries customize this initiative to create an easier-to-use banking platform. Customer adoption will also likely increase multi-fold as we move towards a hardened, secure, and validated open banking ecosystem. Not only will open banking provide transparency across the banking ecosystem, but it will provide banking customers with more choices in financial products and vendors than ever before.

GlobalLogic Cafe: DevOps Acceleration Using App Modernization Approach for Azure

In this Cafe session, hosted by GlobalLogic and Microsoft, we share an overview of modern application development and the benefits it provides. We focus on segmenting the applications based on customer needs and how to achieve desired business outcomes. The session showcases best practices and the building blocks that customers typically rely on while designing modern cloud applications in two segments of applications development:

  1. Rapid application development
  2. Cloud native application development

We also discuss the benefits of the Microsoft Azure platform, as well as the various tools and building blocks, resources, and accelerators that we have used to successfully help customers modernize the applications. The session demonstrates how some of the solutions (e.g. GlobalLogic’s OpeNgine) have been used to  stitch the various parts of the Azure cloud environment together and use the managed Kubernetes platform for faster Application Services deployments.

SPEAKERS:

  • Moninder Bhogal, AVP - Head Of Cloud Practice, GlobalLogic
  • Mike Richter, Cloud Solution Architect, Microsoft
  • Tommy Falgout, Cloud Solution Architect, Microsoft

GlobalLogic Cafe: Enterprise Grade Multi-Screen QA Automation Using Katalon Framework

A well designed, enterprise-grade QA automation framework, is a key cornerstone of product engineering. Often a product has a multi-screen experience and there is a need to have a unified QA automation framework to cater to multiple screens. In some of the regulated industries, a higher % of automation is an implicit requirement.

In this GlobalLogic Cafe Session, we explore how organizations can use Katalon & build an end-to-end multi-screen, enterprise-grade QA automation framework. Backed by a deep experience in QA engineering gained across complex projects, our team will provide examples to build robust automation systems using Katalon Framework.

  • How Katalon can help create an end to end QA automation framework  with reliability, scalability, speed and cater to Multiscreen ( Web, Mobile, Desktop )
  • How to get started with Katalon and implement BDD, use test recorder, create custom reports etc
  • How to develop robust QA automation architecture using Katalon and best practices around it

Speaker:

Hrushikesh Zadgaonkar | Senior Lead, Engineering, GlobalLogic
Hrushikesh carries over 10 years of software industry experience. He has worked in various domains such as Telecom, BFSI and Medtech. He carries deep expertise in cutting edge mobile technologies like Android, iOS, Flutter, Low-code, BLE beacons & machine learning. He is involved in designing core QA automation architecture for FDA-compliant Class III medical software applications. He has a strong track record in building, mentoring, leading development for mobile apps in small & large teams. He leads the cross-platform vertical at Nagpur under Mobility Practices. He has authored a book on Mobile automation and published a few research papers in International Journals.

GlobalLogic Cafe: Consumer Analytics — Metrics for Success on OTT Platforms

The global OTT market size was valued at $121.61 billion in 2019, and is projected to reach $1,039.03 billion by 2027, growing at a CAGR of 29.4% from 2020 to 2027 according to allied market research. To succeed, today’s OTT providers need to acquire a deeper understanding of the consumer habits & choices, monitor user behavior across platforms, continuously measure metrics that matter for a better subscriber retention and minimizing churn rate.

Understanding of segments of users who may be willing to pay a premium to avoid ads or consumers willing to watch ads to get free content can help drive strategies for OTT monetization. To achieve these outcomes, OTT providers should consider implementing consumer analytics solutions in a way that will enable them to understand the full view of customer attitudes towards content, In-app ads and response to marketing.

Speakers

Ashish Kalvakota | AVP Engineering, GlobalLogic
Ashish is a seasoned product leader with end-to-end digital transformation product and platform experience. He is accountable for building products, platforms and services aimed at solving key customer pain points. Passionate about building Product Engineering Centers of excellence, he focuses on scale, innovation, cost efficiency and delivery acceleration. Ashish has worked across the media and entertainment (M&E) industry landscape building products for media, gaming, embedded platforms, infotainment, and edutainment segments.

Aftab Sheikh | Director of Engineering, GlobalLogic
Aftab is a media veteran and carries over a decade experience in the M&E space. Previously, he worked with media giants like Walt Disney, UTV, and Sony Pictures. With more than 20 years of experience with consumer facing digital products and technology, Aftab has a passion for developing innovative solutions that combine cutting-edge technology with a deep understanding of consumer & business needs. Aftab has led many product and marketing technology and platform investment decisions, coordinating the full product-development lifecycle from ideation, strategic planning, requirements analysis, QA testing, and all the way to product launches. He has been a part of many successful digital product launches in the past, including the DisneyLife OTT app in the Philippines, Bindass & UTV Movies OTT, the World Cup T20 cricket games app, Sony's Indian Idol, and SonyLIV OTT, to name just a few.

GlobalLogic Cafe: Digital Leadership — Creating a (Software) Product Driven Organization 

The notion of transforming one’s products and services using digital technology is no longer an exercise in abstract thinking. There are so many examples of successful transformation in most industries, and there are now vast bodies of knowledge, from consultants and advisors to playbooks and guides that openly share best practices. So, with all of this know-how and available case studies, why do organizations have such difficulty in finding their path to successful transformational outcomes?

In this edition of the GlobalLogic Cafe our guests Luigi Guadagno, Software Executive at WBA (Walgreens Boots Alliance) and Dr. Sunil Singh, CTO, GlobalLogic will share their real-world insights around the concept of the (software) Product-Driven Organization, an approach to delivering value through software, that challenges the current structure and legacy approaches to IT and product development. The product-driven organization will look at Tech, Development lifecycle, Culture and KPI’s in a different way, which promotes more successful transformations.

Speakers

Luigi Guadagno, Software Technology Executive, WBA
Luigi Guadagno began his 30+ year career as a software engineer at Motorola. He went on to found six technology start-ups and is currently leading the development of WBA’s RX Renewal platform. Luigi is also a former adjunct professor from DePaul University, where he spent 10 years teaching software engineering, QA, architecture, and project management. An engineer at heart, Luigi holds 1 patent and 75+ disclosures and applications.

Sunil Singh, CTO, GlobalLogic
Dr. Sunil K. Singh is a technologist with a distinguished career and hands-on experience in conceptualizing, designing, building, and launching innovative technology products and services.  Prior to joining GlobalLogic, Sunil was the  Managing Partner at Citadel Ventures, a venture investment arm and technology firm that incubated hi-tech startups in areas of big data analytics, AI, supply chain, and food delivery.

Digitalization in the Energy & Utilities Sector

How Companies are Becoming More Data-Driven and Moving Faster to the Cloud

Every industry is going through digital transformation, and the energy and utilities market is no exception. These companies need to adopt various digital changes in their business models and processes in order to transform the way energy is produced, delivered, and consumed across the value chain. Businesses who find a way to successfully leverage data and provide more accurate information via predictive analytics can improve their operational performance, make better business decisions, and improve the customer experience.

The Drive for Energy & Utilities Analytics

According to the report from MarketsandMarkets, the global energy and utilities analytics market size is expected to grow from $2bn in 2020 to $4.3bn by 2025, at a CAGR of 16.3%. Adoption of smart meters, prioritization of power generation planning, and the need for accurate forecasting are expected to be the key factors driving the growth for the energy and utilities analytics market.

For utilities companies, big data and analytics are essential for gaining a deeper understanding of customer behavior, identifying how to improve solution performance, and gaining insights to better grow their business. With data analytics, energy providers can personalize their programs to maximize customer participation, as well as modernize these relationships to increase engagement.

The renewable energy market is another area that can benefit from big data analytics. According to the report from Mordor Intelligence, solar energy is expected to continue to dominate the renewable energy market, generating much more electricity than wind and hydropower over the next four years. With analytics solutions, utilities can optimize power generation and planning by providing accurate energy production forecasts. 

The Growth of Cloud-Based Analytics Solutions

In the energy and utilities analytics market, there have traditionally been two types of solution providers: software providers and service providers. 

Software vendors — such as TIBCO Software, Oracle, and Intel — offer platforms that deliver predictive analytics and maintenance capabilities, data visualizations for customer information, and power distribution. These platforms help to reduce costs and downtime, as well as improve customer retention by understanding customer consumption patterns and helping improve the customer experience3. Up until recently, software vendors have dominated the utilities analytics market. With the evolution of cloud technologies, however, service providers are gaining more market share.

Service providers — such as AWS, SAS, Google, and Microsoft — help utility companies migrate their analytics to the cloud in order to address issues such as infrastructure scalability, hardware/software costs, and personalized customer experiences. There is no software license or infrastructure to buy, so organizations can reach their efficiency goals by taking advantage of a cloud service’s performance, scale, and ease of use. Cloud solutions offer an elastic, cost-effective storage capacity in which businesses can run complex utility operations, including energy demand and distributed energy forecasting. In fact, MarketsandMarkets expects the adoption of cloud-based energy and utilities analytics solutions to grow significantly due to their numerous benefits (e.g., easy maintenance of data generated, cost-effectiveness, agility, flexibility, scalability, effective solution management).

Cloud-based, data-driven analytics systems are also becoming very important for managing the enormous amount of data being constantly generated by smart meters, IoT sensors, customers’ home energy devices, etc. They help streamline energy efficiency programs and enable utilities companies to deliver flexible power, provide scalability, maintain equipment more easily, and deliver better customer service through more powerful insights. World energy and utilities leaders are already moving their data analytics systems to cloud. For example:

  • TC Energy is partnering with AWS to automate workflows, unlock data, and improve efficiency for its pipeline and power generation businesses.
  • GE Power runs its key data analytics application on AWS, using Amazon Kinesis Data Streams and Amazon Elastic MapReduce.
  • ExxonMobil is collaborating with IBM, Amazon, and other cloud leaders to gain real-time insights from data. This enables them to transform the customer experience by offering consumers new payment options at Exxon- and Mobil-branded service stations in the U.S.
  • Exelon uses Oracle products, including Oracle Analytics Cloud, to access a comprehensive view of its customer engagement across all touchpoints at all utilities and offer multi-channel personalized experiences for its industrial customers. 

Case in Point: Smart Oil Condition Monitoring Service Development

GlobalLogic also works with many energy and utilities companies due to our deep domain expertise in big data and analytics. One of our clients, a leading multinational oil and gas company in Europe, provides an excellent example of how utilities companies can transform their operations through intelligent, cloud-based solutions.

The client approached us about developing a new service for their end customers: a cloud-based smart condition monitoring and predictive maintenance solution that would monitor oil conditions and deliver real-time data about an asset’s health. These insights would enable large industrial companies to prioritize assets that require attention, respond quickly to anomalies before failure occurs, and therefore reduce unplanned downtime. By moving away from time-based maintenance to condition-based maintenance, our client’s solution would improve asset utilization and increase productivity.

We initially started the engagement as a research and development project before moving on to evolve the service from a sensor trial phase to a fully-realized, digitally-enabled solution. The end result was a cloud-based solution that delivers real-time insights and enables users to optimize equipment health, lower maintenance costs, and increase operational efficiency. For our client, the solution is generating new revenue for existing and new customers and sectors, upselling lubricants, and being bundled with existing and future services.

Conclusion

By moving away from old legacy systems and using a data-driven, cloud-enabled approach, energy and utility companies are able to lower operating costs and increase efficiency. Big data and analytics also enable them to provide their customers with better service and design programs for more energy savings — thus ensuring customer loyalty.

Cross-Site Scripting

Cross-site scripting (XSS) is often used to gain access to a user's browser and access their sensitive data. It does this by targeting specific vulnerabilities in the web application and injecting a malicious script unknowingly triggered by the user.

In this whitepaper, we'll talk about the three main types of XSS attack: reflected cross-site scripting, stored cross-site scripting and DOM-based cross-site scripting. Learn what they look like, how they are activated and what they do as well as best practices for preventing this kind of attack and for keeping your web applications safe.

6 Questions to Ask When Looking for a Software Engineering Partner

More than ever, companies are delivering more customer value through software and digital experiences. As a result, more and more businesses are realizing they need a software engineering partner in order to grow — both in terms of size and scale, as well as product / service / feature offerings. In this e-guide, we’ll provide you with best practices for selecting the right software engineering partner and ensuring that your partnership succeeds.

Agile Transformation of the Modern Enterprise with the Advent of LCAP/NCAP Solutions

At a time when most businesses are benefiting from a greater level of agility in their digital transformations, tools are being created that allow for streamlined software development. Such technologies provide enhanced accessibility that enables companies to build, test and deploy business applications more rapidly.

In this whitepaper, you’ll learn about low-code and no-code applications platforms (LCAP/NCAP) and the benefits and challenges associated with each. We'll detail the leading vendors providing these solutions alongside their key features, strengths, and applicability and consider at which stages they can be implemented by different types of businesses for optimal success.

Architecture Compliance with ArchUnit

ArchUnit is a free and easy-to-use source library that automates compliance checks for projects developed in Java. It ensures that all team members involved in customization adhere to architectural decisions, and it prevents them from overriding services or BPM layers in services.

In this whitepaper, you’ll learn how ArchUnit can help you to retain high maintainability by enabling users to quickly pinpoint the layers and segregate changes, enforce architectural quality and achieve greater business efficiency through avoiding time-consuming, error-prone manual reviewing.

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