BANK TO BANK API's
Starfish Translate
Key Challenges
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Corporate customer migration - While API Banking has grown dramatically, the adoption of corporate customers has lagged the retail sector. Even more challenging is eliminating first-mover advantage to convince companies to migrate from competing banks’ services.
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Lack of open banking standards - Open Banking has grown globally and is expected to be adopted in all regions and sectors. However, while some regulators attempt to provide common approaches, many banks still define their own interfaces, data schemas and the way they represents customer information.
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Corporate customers’ existing investment – Corporates are usually responsible for building and maintaining their connection services and business logic to access API Banking offerings, but each bank provides their own unique APIs with proprietary information schema. This requires corporate investment to connect and transact. Moreover, it presents a high “stickiness” factor that makes it difficult to migrate services to a new bank without considerable time and investment.
There are inherent challenges to corporate client adoption of digitally provided financial services that impact a corporate bank’s ability to achieve time-to-revenue and improve customer experiences:
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Technical expertise - API Banking requires technology resources of the corporate client to have the right skills sets to enable digital architectures and future proof systems.
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Security and resilience - Financial services attract attention from hackers and disruptors. While banks invest heavily in information security controls and high availability, the technology implementation at the corporate client might expose services to disruption and data leakage.
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Loss of business through lack of API connectivity - Corporate banking onboarding times can range from 90-120 days with an abandonment rate of 13%.
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Technical debt - companies often have antiquated systems or legacy debt inhibiting integration with treasury systems.
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Differentiation - Each bank provides their unique API Banking configuration. This prevents interoperability and clients cannot reuse their digital connections from one bank to connect with multiple banks.
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Protecting existing investments - Large corporate clients want to preserve their existing investments in API Banking. Corporate banks must provide solutions where companies do not absorb the costs of reworking their existing technology.
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Solution Overview
Starfish Translate is reserved for Starfish Digital strategic banking partners and purpose built to deliver secure and private API translation services.
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Bank translator – Starfish Translate is, at its core, an information translator. Using our proprietary logic engine, we rapidly translate API schemas from their originators to reflect the configuration required by recipients. By interrogating the existing business logic, Starfish Translate can also engineer the information provided and build the appropriate plug-in to supply your information, in the desired format and structure expected.
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Data security and privacy – A paramount concern for a bank and the corporate customer is the validation that information is secure, private, and un-accessible by anyone other than authorised personnel. Starfish Digital employs end-to-end connectivity security and data encryption with a black box architecture to guarantee privacy of information translation activities. Data can only be accessed and viewed by the sending and receiving parties. Our products have been CREST certified.
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Fully managed – Starfish Translate is a fully managed product offering, which benefits from twenty-four seven operational support. Starfish Digital deploys, tests, and manages all corporate customers connected via Starfish Translate.
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Future-proof maintenance – All Starfish Translate connectors for your bank and commissioned competitor connectors are maintained by Starfish Digital. As you grow and mature your Open Banking APIs, Starfish Digital ensures existing Starfish Translate customers are up-to-date with no interference of service.
Starfish Translate is reserved for Starfish Digital strategic banking partners and purpose built to deliver secure and private API translation services.
Connect any competitor bank’s corporate customer to your Open Banking portal with no change to the customer side infrastructure, business logic or connectors. Grow your market share and take smart leaps ahead.
Key Benefits
Large companies demand digital banking products and services. For the Chief Financial Officer (CFO), the digitalisation of banking services is a pre-requisite to creating integrated treasury management. The modern CFO is looking to eliminate the need to manage multiple banking relationship for real-time access to payments, status inquiry, and account information and the ability to make dynamic cash management decisions. For Chief Information Officers, API Banking provides a transparent and secure technology means to build that integration between the banks and their treasury systems.
Companies who have already made investments in digital connections to banks, want to see those investments preserved. A frequent practice, is to regularly tender their banking relationships to evaluate best value.
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Better service – Banks can offer clients a digital fully-automated offering with greater agility, accuracy, and with lower risks of manual error and number of people with access to key information. Digital connections provide a fully automated service with greater agility, accuracy, and lower risks of manual error and number of people with access to key information.
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Customer data - Banks can capture better customer data to identify greater value opportunities for cash management, lending, payments, and advisory services.
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Client Innovation – API Banking enables clients to embed banking services through technology, such as instant payments and loans, into their clients’ innovative products.
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Better data – With integration between their finance systems and bank services, corporates have access to better data to reconcile their account balances, transactions, payments and make faster investment decisions.
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Evolution of treasury - Corporates are demanding a single view of all its financial relationship to optimise spend tracking, working capital management, tax accounting, and auditing. This intelligence directly enables business to identify opportunities in supply chain management, finance and accounting, CRM (Customer Relationship Management) and sales management and growth.
Key Features
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Seamless transitioning of customers to corporate banking services - Starfish Translate, our proprietary API Banking translator automatically converts your API banking information and schemas to mirror the appearance of your competitor’s.
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Customised API solutions – The global Open Banking landscape continues develop and mature with better defined standards and inter-operability requirements. In the interim, Bank have the flexibility to provide services in exclusive schemas. While this will not change in the short term, by partnering with Starfish Digital, you will receive your custom Starfish Translate solution.
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Rapid onboarding of corporate clients - By leveraging Starfish Translate, new customers maintain their existing connectivity and business logic investment. Through replicating the information schema and socket connections of alternative banks can easily onboard customer. Corporate customers will not need to change any of their bank connectivity infrastructure or business logic. Banks can leverage existing capabilities and employ Starfish Translate to connect with API Banking services directly.
Starfish Digital provides API onboarding in a matter of weeks with our proprietary technology. So, you can address today’s challenges and take smart leaps ahead.