MuleSoft returned to Money20/20 as part of the Salesforce product ecosystem to showcase innovative solutions designed to help banks, credit unions, fintech organizations, and other financial institutions do more with less and accelerate their digital transformation.
In typical Money20/20 fashion, topics such as payments networks, open banking, digital disruption, fintech innovation, embedded finance, customer experiences, regulations, and more dominated the stage. Here’s a recap of the conversations and themes MuleSoft leaned into at Money20/20.
Payments modernization, ISO 20022 readiness, and embedded finance
The payments landscape is seeing disruption primarily driven by the desired customer experience, innovative alternatives from digital natives and regulatory trends towards a more open architecture with the global adoption of standards such as open banking.
Yet most financial institutions (FIs) find that existing monolithic legacy systems impede adaptability with costly implications, including high development costs to maintain repetitive integrations and performance and security issues that impact the consumer experience. Conversations at previous Money20/20 events unlocked these insights.
The MuleSoft team saw an opportunity to deliver a solution that would help banks, fintech organizations and payment service providers deal with the challenges associated with evolving their payments infrastructure. This year, the team returned to showcase those payment solutions.
Payments modernization
MuleSoft offers a Payments Application Network built on reusable APIs that create a composable architecture which solves the integration problems of monolithic legacy systems. Essentially, this network offers a payments-as-a-service model that maximizes adherence to modern payments standards and accelerates the delivery of new payments capabilities through reuse, thus enabling FIs to be more agile.
This Payments Modernization use case has also been delivered as a use case for MuleSoft Accelerator for Financial Services, pre-built solutions that enable FIs to accelerate the creation of their Customer 360 initiatives. Additionally, MuleSoft offers pre-built connectors from technology partners that allows customers to integrate to external systems faster. Two of such partners Volante Technologies and Stripe were on ground at the Salesforce Money20/20 booth to showcase their joint value with MuleSoft.
ISO 20022 readiness
Speaking on ISO20022 Readiness, Jim Chow, VP of WorldWide Partnerships at Volante Technologies, outlined how FIs can leverage MuleSoft’s Volante Connector to easily connect to Volante’s ISO 20022 Service via ready-to-use APIs for creation, validation, or financial message transformation covering multiple domains and market infrastructures. This readily available integration simplifies and accelerates derisking for the ISO20022 standardization journey.
Embedded finance
The session on embedded finance showcased the value of MuleSoft’s Stripe Connector in helping businesses integrate Stripe financial infrastructure with other critical business systems. Stripe helps businesses offer financial tools like Capital Loans and Treasury Financial Accounts to their customers across multiple industries.
CIOs can cut cost and increase productivity by empowering everyone with automation
As economic uncertainty grows and a recession looms, productivity, efficiency, and growth continue to remain top priorities for bank CIOs. It’s clear that putting IT at the center of driving the business doesn’t work.To move fast, business teams often have to circumvent IT.
Automation solutions like MuleSoft RPA seek to empower everyone in the business to deliver better customer and employee experiences by eliminating repetitive work, and accelerating innovation. This is why MuleSoft launched its automation solution, making it the only unified platform for integration, API management, and automation for driving top-line business initiatives.
Showcasing MuleSoft’s automation solution, alongside partners like Deloitte and Thought Machine, Eddie Ward, Director of MuleSoft Product Marketing for Financial Services, shared the three ways in which MuleSoft’s Anypoint Platform enables organizations to unlock the true promise of automation.
- Innovate faster: Your business teams can easily leverage and reuse APIs and resources created by IT – saving time, and allowing them to build more quickly. By working together across teams, your organization can create a flywheel of innovation.
- Build worry-free: IT is empowered to better manage and govern development of integration and automation across your organization, so your business can innovate without worrying about security and vulnerabilities
- Ensure resilience: Centralized monitoring powered by Anypoint Platform allows your IT team to ensure the reliability and resilience that your enterprise demands
What is top of mind for bank CIOs today?
MuleSoft hosted over 20 bank executives to an exclusive roundtable session where we uncovered today’s CIOs’ priorities and shared how MuleSoft can support their transformation journey.
The session kicked off with a panel discussion featuring the following:
- Tom Mazzaferro, Western Union’s Chief Data and Information Officer
- Robin Smith, Mambu’s Regional Vice President, North America
- Kurt Anderson, Managing Director, Cloud API Practice and Mulesoft Alliance Leader, Deloitte Consulting, LLP
In his opening comments, Tom relayed the value of a connected ecosystem of technology partners like MuleSoft, Mambu and Deloitte in driving the successful launch of Western Union’s digital bank, which already exceeds 100,000 customers.
5 key insights from our executive roundtable session at Money20/20
We’ve rounded up five key insights from our executive roundtable session below.
1. Partners, not vendors, deliver success
When evaluating technology solution providers to work with, it is important that CIOs choose technology partners, like MuleSoft, that truly invest in partnering with the business to drive long-term success. A vendor wants to sell a solution and move on to the next customer; a partner on the other hand is committed to starting with the business and going on a journey of success. As a partner, MuleSoft will help you integrate the different pieces that make up your technology ecosystem for success.
2. Start where you are
CIOs recognize that digital transformation is not only necessary but existential. Yet, a lot struggle with how and where to start on their transformation journey. The answer? Start where you are. Create a vision of what your end-state and success looks like, and find a technology partner(s) that will go on that journey with you, no matter where you’re starting from. Think big, start small, fail fast.
3. Status quo will kill your business faster than competition
We are in an era of disruption and the financial services industry is no different. The confluence of technology, customer expectations and increasing industry regulations is transforming every aspect of financial services right before our eyes. The biggest threat to traditional financial institutions? Status quo.
Staying the same and not keeping up with the change that is fast sweeping the industry. How? Well, today’s customers are smarter, expect more and have endless options at their disposal. If your customers find a cheaper, faster, better alternative, they will leave.
4. Security and governance is key to building trust
Banking is fundamentally an industry of trust. When buying financial products, customers rank trust as a top three important factor. In the Open Banking era, when it comes to sharing access to sensitive financial data, trust is also essential.
With increasing adoption of API-led technology, it is critical that these Enterprise APIs are not only securely deployed, but can be controlled and governed across environments. MuleSoft’s API Governance tool really stabilizes the foundation of universal api management by ensuring consistent quality and compliance across every API (new or old, mule or non-mule) in the enterprise.
5. Ready or not, Web3.0 is coming
Besides the typical applications we hear about Blockchain that are specific to the crypto world, there are a tremendous amount of blockchain applications in every aspect of financial services. For instance, trade finance, cross-border payments and remittances, and international interbank transactions are aspects of finance that will see significant value from Web3.0 application. MuleSoft is already leveraging decentralized ledger technology (DLT) to build out Web3.0 use cases in real-time payments, consolidated account management and micro-exchanges.
In his closing remarks, Kurt underscored the value of networking at events like the executive roundtable that allows CIOs to connect with each other and build a trusted community to rely on. While financial services remains a highly competitive industry, the truth, he said, is that there are ample opportunities for IT leaders to share ideas, to learn from each other, and to grow together. The journey of digital transformation does not have to be a lone one for today’s leaders.
The latest MuleSoft product announcements at Money20/20
Here’s a rundown of the latest MuleSoft products and solutions featured at Money20/20.
MuleSoft Accelerator for Financial Services
These are pre-built technical assets and blueprints specifically designed to help businesses solve key use cases across multiple industries. Each industry accelerator includes API specs, implementation templates, reference architectures and additional tech assets such as lightning web components. These assets are available to use as is, or can be customized to fit your systems and architecture.
The MuleSoft Accelerator for Financial Services simplifies the delivery of customer 360 initiatives by unlocking both core banking and insurance platforms, systems of engagement (such as CRM and ITSM), Insuretechs, and fintech data.
What use case does the Accelerator solve for?
To date we have released six use cases for MuleSoft Accelerator for Financial Services. At Money20/20, we highlighted the two below:
- Payments Modernization: This use case supports the accelerated development of complex payment solutions, for banks and credit unions, by leveraging the power of an application network built on reusable APIs.
- Optimize Customer Experiences with CDP: This use case leverages the power of APIs to enable banks and financial institutions to easily and quickly ingest data into Customer Data Platform powered by Genie, from both internal and external sources to create a unified profile of each customer.
MuleSoft RPA for Financial Services
Purpose-built for every team, MuleSoft RPA brings the new robotic process automation capabilities that enable complete end-to-end business automation, making MuleSoft the only unified platform for integration, APIs, and automation.
MuleSoft RPA replaces repetitive tasks with bots that can intelligently process documents, enter data, or act on legacy or modern applications on the user’s behalf – all without code. The new capabilities are also fully integrated into Salesforce Flow, a complete suite of automation technologies across the Customer 360 to help save time, increase productivity, and deliver better experiences.
What use case does MuleSoft RPA solve for?
There are several use cases for MuleSoft RPA within financial services. At Money20/20 we highlighted one below:
- Automate AML/KYC: AML & KYC processes are manual, time intensive, and highly sensitive given the regulatory scrutiny applied. MuleSoft RPA can automate data extraction, data entry, and processing across applications, documents, and images to execute this business critical process faster and with much greater accuracy than humans.
Beyond these conversations, it was exciting to be back in Las Vegas with over 10,000 other attendees from across 90 countries. There were over 400 speakers, including sports legends Derek Jeter and Allyson Felix, both of whom shared the stage with Mark Sullivan, Salesforce EVP, Financial Services, in a conversation on leading through adversity. This was a timely conversation given the headwinds of inflation, rising interest rates, and market volatility, which have all rocked the economy and made the path ahead more challenging for the financial sector.
Conclusion
While there are challenging times ahead, the reality is, the fintech ecosystem is thriving and full of opportunities with emerging technology trends and solutions that would lead us through adversity.
For more on MuleSoft’s solutions for financial services, here are a few resources:
- Explore how leaders are doubling down on automation to close the IT delivery gap
- See how APIs are delivering value for financial institutions
- Learn three key steps to building a successful legacy modernization strategy
