Digital Banking Solution Simplifies IT and Fosters Co-Innovation

(Source - SAP Website)

We had play with the latest release of SAP Omnichannel Banking, a digital banking solution for the ‘bank of tomorrow’.

The offering simplifies the process of managing mobile and online applications for retail, small business and commercial banking customers on a single platform built on open standards. With more than 500 available microservices, the new digital banking solution helps banks build responsive mobile, tablet and desktop apps with a unique, digital customer experience.

SAP Omnichannel Banking complements the solutions for customer engagement and commerce in the SAP Hybris portfolio to form a comprehensive offering for banks to manage all aspects of customer interaction. Planned application programming interface (API) integration between these components will provide customers a seamless experience across multiple touchpoints. Together, SAP Omnichannel Banking and the SAP Hybris solution portfolio will enable banks to deploy intelligent digital sales and service processes, creating personalized customer interaction across all channels and helping banks get a 360-degree view of their customers.

The modular architecture of the solution enables banks to roll out new products and services in an incremental fashion, without disrupting existing functionality. The solution can be deployed on premise or in the cloud and also addresses the need for faster time to market as well as an increasing frequency of updates. By providing an extensive library of customization accelerators and a single call-out for over 200 configuration services, the solution can substantially reduce the effort involved in developing bank-specific extensions. In addition, SAP Omnichannel Banking provides state-of-the-art tooling in the form of Eclipse plug-ins, a widely used integrated development environment (IDE) for developing microservices. This vastly increases development productivity and allows a growing ecosystem of established partners and FinTechs to further enrich SAP’s offering.

“For banks, maintaining multiple platforms requires multiple work streams, separate maintenance schedules and a slow, complex approach to updates,” said Falk Rieker, global head of the banking business unit at SAP. “With SAP Omnichannel Banking and SAP Hybris solutions, we are providing a holistic offering to manage all types of digital customer engagement – mobile and online, and across multiple lines of business. This is nothing short of a game changer, one that empowers banks to differentiate from each other and allows them to provide a tailored, digital customer experience.”

The latest release of SAP Omnichannel Banking provides:

• Comprehensive business logic and robust self-service features that power out-of-the-box applications for retail and commercial banking
• Components to centralize critical, operational tasks by providing frameworks for security, entitlements, approvals, alerting, channel management, scheduling, distributed caching, notifications, validations, customer insight aggregation, digital process framework, user administration, and channel and device management
• Open architecture that supports third-party business services and partner integration with the goal of creating collaborative scenarios and accelerating innovation
• Fully responsive SAPUI5, removing all restrictions on the technology used for UI development
• Optional integration with SAP’s core banking solution

A recent IDC study commissioned by SAP found that banks want to collaborate with FinTech startups; however, the complexity of the IT architectures within banks makes that collaboration cumbersome. The API framework built into SAP Omnichannel Banking streamlines this process. Banks now are flexible enough to take an active role in the ecosystem, partner with FinTech companies and engage with established partners and industry leaders.