Optimizing technology across bank business lines

How do you tackle a huge question, and opportunity, like the one framing our topic in May’s BAI Executive Report: Which resources and priorities are key to optimizing technology at your banks and credit unions?

In many ways, we could dedicate an entire edition just to your ongoing core integrations, and another to tech vendor relationships. Certainly, the evolution of Banking-as-a-Service (BaaS), payments integration and broader digital platform upkeep are moving targets that you scrutinize every day and worthy of singular deep coverage. What about the latest in cloud and AI, not to mention the smart technology spending necessary to stay ahead of fraud risks?

Please know that we think about the depth and breadth of the subjects that drive your decision-making as we create our content, including as we regularly populate our BAI Banking Strategies hub with articles, podcasts, whitepapers and webinars on technology subjects and more. We hope you are visiting there often, sharing the pieces you know will impact your teams, and that you feel empowered to contact us with the topics you’d like to hear about.

To pinpoint technology optimization for the May issue, however, we turned to our seasoned writers, industry advisers and contributing tech solutions providers, and we tried very hard to listen to banking personnel across several lines of business to narrow our approach to what’s top of mind right now.

In this month’s opening feature, spending priorities and operational efficiency create the backdrop for ideas on technology upgrades that are more than maintenance. Rather, they must feed your strategies as much as any other input.

As Sai Rangachari of Temenos stresses in the article, “At some point, if you don’t transform your legacy technology, it starts limiting your ability to invest in other areas. This cost will continue to exacerbate the problem as higher perceived risk (of transformation) often leads to inaction while banks struggle to recruit new talent to work on legacy technology.”

We also ask and answer whether it is best to source your pursuit of BaaS organically or with a third party. The answer is—you guessed it—it largely depends. The good news is that our piece explores which path makes the most sense depending on the organization, and how to retain control of this expansion regardless.

Our contributors, meanwhile, deliver with elevated thinking across the technology spectrum:

• Raisin’s Cetin Duransoy explores tech relationships that give any size footprint a competitive equalizer.
• In his piece, MeridianLink’s Devesh Khare drives home that in a disrupted market technology is only part of the equation. To stay ahead, he says, banking modernization must connect the front-end experience with back-end efficiency.
• Jack Henry’s Toni Domingo has a comprehensive list of customer-first tech priorities. Among them: the industry’s shift toward using secure API connections that offer greater control, security and visibility into data-sharing practices, while meeting regulatory expectations.
• Zebra’s Roger Koscielski walks us through the tech solutions to reverse the misguided branch scheduling that historically has meant understaffing during peak hours or overstaffing during slow periods, negatively impacting service and labor costs.
• And, Moody’s Yi Chen has a valuable message: Technology is at its best when it makes humans better. His exploration of AI in lending, across credit approvals, covenants and other error-prone tasks focuses on the cost reductions and productivity improvement that banking leaders desire.

Please enjoy the May BAI Executive Report’s glimpse at many of the technology optimization considerations driving the conversations in our industry. We know this is only a start, so let’s keep talking.

Rachel Koning Beals is Senior Editor with BAI.