Tag: BaaS

Railsbank

How to connect Railsbank to finance systems

Posted on | by Integrated Finance

If you are a financial service provider and want to make a new connection to Railsbank quickly, the new platform IF CONNECT can help easily automate your integration. What’s more, if you are using other vendors such as Barclays, ClearBank, or CurrencyCloud, you can also connect to them easily and use all the systems together, seamlessly.

This platform does the hard work for you, so you don’t need to, with one simple API for Railsbank and more. 

Connect once, and for all

When you Connect Railsbank to any one of the multiple finance systems it is compatible with, it will automate the process in one quick and easy way. By connecting Railsbank alongside other vendors and your front-end platform, you can then perform several actions that you’d expect including:

  • Accessing Wholesales Foreign Exchange Rates
  • Issuing bank accounts to your customers
  • Multi-Jurisdictional Licence
  • Compliance-as-a-Service

The best way to connect Railsbank with Fintech

IF CONNECT only needs to be connected once, and it will keep all your systems up-to-date even if banks change their API. By effortlessly introducing new payment providers to your platform, for example integrating Barclays Bank, CurrencyCloud or Clear Bank, or any other FinTech, it turns it into the ultimate SAAS banking solution for you and your customers.

In fact, you avoid high upfront development fees and then pay as you grow on a monthly basis.

How to connect to Railsbank easily along with multiple vendors

All the systems are connected seamlessly to one hub (IF CONNECT), easily connecting several banks, apps and financial compliance tools including AML, KYC or KYB.

The application also keeps the connection to Railsbank and other systems up to date, even if the bank changes their API (which happens frequently).

Fast track fintech product development

Using IF CONNECT as the hub, you can also easily grow your product offering by quickly introducing new payment providers that match your specific needs. You can add Barclays Bank very easily for example.

We take the hard development work out of making the connection to Railsbank and others, so you can focus on your own product development.

What’s more, if you also need a modern front office customer portal, IF CORE may be the ideal SAAS banking platform for you – with connections built in.

Request a demo by getting in touch today.

Fintech infrastructure

The three ways modern fintech infrastructure is built

Posted on | by Integrated Finance

Modern customer-facing financial services are all built on a stack of third-party vendors. That stack typically looks something like the below, featuring market infrastructure, bank transactions, card transactions and data access:

The driving force behind the modern financial service stack is the unbundling of banking services, with each product and service on a level of the stack now delivered by a single firm. This compares historically to a single firm delivering services on every level of the stack directly to the customers.

The benefits businesses get from unbundled banking include: better products at much more visible prices and availability to a wider audience, particularly at the lower end of business size where high fixed costs are more of a blocker to get started.

The downside to the new stack is the need to build and maintain multiple financial integrations on each level depending on what service a firm provides to customers. That comes with upfront development costs, as well as the opportunity cost of not having developers focus 100% on the core offering.

Out of the new financial stack three business models have emerged to help businesses building financial services products:

  1. Unregulated BaaS Providers: these Fintech’s offer banking infrastructure APIs to customers and partner with a few banks or Fintech’s (usually 1-4) on the back end. Examples include Bankable, Marqeta & Swan
  2. Regulated Banks and Fintech’s Offering BaaS APIs: this includes both legacy (e.g., Citi, Goldman), digital-first banks (e.g., Clearbank, Cross River) and larger Fintech (Railsbank, Currency Cloud, Nium) offering APIs through BaaS platforms.
  3. Unregulated API Routing Layers Offering Financial Infrastructure API Marketplaces. (e.g Integrated Finance, Bond). A financial service routing layer offers access to a large ecosystem of banks and Fintechs (all of the providers in 1 & 2 above), giving customers much more choice over who to partner with and vastly reduce the risk associated with dependency on a single provider, should they go down.

We may be biased, but we think the third model (API routing layers) gives some major advantages to businesses building financial service products in the modern world.

Integrated Finance is an API routing layer for financial services. Our platform enables you to programmatically access multiple financial service vendors via a single API, removing costly upfront integrations and significantly reducing the often hidden ongoing costs of maintaining those integrations.

Get in touch to find out more.

API routing layer -Advantages of using an API routing layer

Advantages of using an API routing layer for building financial service products

Posted on | by Integrated Finance

Modern customer-facing financial services are all built on a stack of third-party vendors, with three core business models emerging – unregulated BaaS providers, regulated banks and fintechs offering BaaS APIs or unregulated API routing layers.

We might be biased, but with the help of Integrated Finance, we think the API first, developer friendly routing layer model gives some major advantages to businesses building financial service products and here’s why.

Building and maintaining multiple providers

As the new financial services technical stack emerged so too has a plethora of suppliers that focus on each specific layer. With many fintech vendors looking very much like enterprise sales organisations,  identifying subtle differences in services providers can be hard for customers without specific background knowledge. Time then is wasted on selecting the wrong vendor, getting a commercial agreement and integrating. The huge opportunity cost for a business is not working on your core offering.

Beyond the distraction of building your core I.P another distinct challenge is that whilst each supplier does more or less the same thing, the way you interact with these vendors varies greatly. The data required to post and receive information for account generation, FX, and regionally specific payments has no unified standard. There is no open banking API for this stuff.

Simplifying difficult to do, legacy financial integrations

Anyone who has tried to connect to a bank running on legacy systems will know what a pain it can be, both from the customer and bank’s perspective. For customers, legacy connection methods are difficult to implement without specialist help because of sparse information in the large code repositories.

Banks and legacy bank integration firms have been slow to externalise their knowledge, making it harder for developers from outside financial services to find useful help without paying and third parties to do the integration on your behalf. 

Integrated Finance builds and maintains difficult, legacy integrations and transforms them into a simple to use modern API. Crucially, banks will continue to play an integral role in our ecosystem, providing a modern wrap-around for their own legacy integration methods.

Focus on your core offering, unleash your developers

Let’s face it, financial service integrations are not cool. They are also probably not your core customer offering. During the initial stages of getting a product working, integrations might seem important but as a business scales they soon lose their allure.

It’s a problem we see again and again, choosing whether the team’s responsibility is to look after non-core integrations, when there are super cool (and urgent) core customer features to build. So it gets neglected and responsibility falls through the cracks. Then disaster strikes, one of the vendors changes their APIs and your whole system goes down and the CEO shouts at you.

API routing layers solve this problem, allowing your development team to focus on your core offering and not needing to worry about maintaining uncool financial plumbing. Our platform attaches a SAAS fee to the unsexy task of building and maintaining integrations to your financial service providers. Overall organisational cost is lower than having your developers distracted and focusing on non-core features.

Advantages for product teams

Using a routing layer gives a product team access the functionality of a company with significantly larger resources. Built in redundancy where you can easily route traffic to multiple providers or add and subtract vendors quickly and easily. The API routing layers enable fast growing products to quickly achieve the right cost, speed, reliability, or experience optimisation for your business.

Leveling the playing field. Turning high fixed cost financial infrastructure into a pay-as-you-grow subscription

Financial service companies of every size can now, either early in their development or as they scale, add massive optionality and coverage to their product offering via our API routing layer. Our customers are able to enable similar impact and feature depth as much larger and better funded competitors at scale.

Get in touch to find out more about Integrated Finance.