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Banks and financial service providers are experiencing a period of rapid transformation. Heightened by the contact-less needs of COVID-19, new digital regulations, and increased digital-first expectations from customers, banks are now in a position where transformation can no longer be delayed. 

The problem is, many financial services companies have several hurdles to get over to make this transformation possible — including modernizing their outdated legacy infrastructure, enabling digital experiences, and digitizing manual processes

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Below are four use cases for MuleSoft to help financial service organizations enable digital transformation: 

#1 Front office digitization in wealth asset management

Customers today expect immediate access to their financial portfolios and accounts — seeking easy-to-use connected, digital experiences to do so. To enable these such experiences, organizations need to integrate various financial back-end and front-end systems. 

In this demo, Mythical Bank is looking to create a best-in-class digital experience for its customers. To make this web application work, the bank uses an API-led approach to expose data assets and manage data integration from systems like MongoDB in a secure and efficient way. 

#2 Digitizing the customer onboarding process

Banking customers expect to open an account in less than an hour — a digital-first expectation that turned into a necessity when branches closed during COVID-19. Many banks are bogged down with inefficient manual processes, often still using paper-based forms to sign new customers up for an account. 

Royal Bank of Canada’s (RBC) onboarding process took several weeks and required its advisors to create 200-300 page documents with sticky notes that indicated where clients should sign to finalize opening the account. To solve this, RBC used reusable APIs — such as the Accounts API, Risk API, and Documents API — to unlock and integrate siloed data in LexisNexis, the bank’s client database, and other on-premises, legacy, and cloud systems. This allowed customers to open a new account online while giving advisors a single view of each customer and their onboarding process. 

#3 Streamline and scale lending operations with AI and API-led integration

Lenders today are under immense pressure from surging mortgage demand, massive small business relief programs, and thin margins — manual processes and applications can’t scale with current demands. APIs can streamline expensive manual processes and allow lenders to quickly deliver connected borrower experiences.

This demo shows how lenders can scale the loan origination process — from document upload to loan review and underwriting — with out-of-the-box connectors for various lending systems.  These connectors allow lenders to intelligently scrape and collect data from an application and  input it into Box, Salesforce, GLYNT, the LOS, and other systems.

#4 Broaden lending opportunities with API developer portal

In addition to making internal processes more efficient, lenders can accelerate innovation by shifting from a closed model of innovation to an open one. An open model of innovation unlocks  new potential for a lender’s existing technologies and capabilities by making them available to third-party developers. 

By producing a standardized set of documentation, security policies, and usage analytics, lenders can expose pre-approval engines via an API that third parties can consume within their own mobile apps. This allows lending innovations to serve new audiences, such as FinTechs or BigTechs, who may be looking to help their customers obtain mortgages but lack the expertise, capital, or regulatory approval to do so.