On April 19, Netflix reported its first loss in subscribers — 200,000 in the first quarter, with 2 million projected for the second — resulting in a steep decline in its stock price, as well as layoffs and budget cuts. Why the drop? Although the company blames consumers sharing passwords with each other, the legacy streamer also faces increased competition such as HBO Max and Disney Plus. That also creates more choice for the 85% of U.S. households that use a streaming service, according to the U.K. brand consulting firm Kantar. The average household subscribes to 4.7 of them.
Our financial lives are just as complicated — and there’s a lot more at stake when it comes to managing our money. A 2021 survey conducted by Plaid found that 88% of Americans use digital services to help manage their money, representing a 30-point increase from 2020. Americans use a lot of financial apps, and the majority want their bank to connect to these providers. Baby boomers use an average of 2.6 of these apps, which include digital banking and lending, payments, investments, budgeting and financial management. Gen Z consumers average 4.6 financial apps.
“Banks can be material to simplifying the complexity that’s causing everybody to struggle and not have clarity on their financial picture,” said Lee Wetherington, senior director of corporate strategy at the core provider Jack Henry & Associates. He described this fractured competitive landscape as “financial fragmentation,” which formed the focus of his presentation at Experience FinXTech, a tech-focused event that took place May 5 and 6 in Austin, Texas. Successful banks will figure out how to make their app the central hub for their customers, he said in an interview conducted in advance of the conference. “This is where I see the opportunity for community financial institutions to lever open banking rails to bring [those relationships] back home.”
During the event, Wetherington revealed results from a new Jack Henry survey finding that more than 90% of community financial institutions plan to embed fintech — integrating innovative, third-party products and services into banks’ own product offerings and processes — over the next two years.
Put simply, open banking acknowledges today’s fractured banking ecosystem and leverages application programming interfaces (APIs) that allow different applications or systems to exchange data.
Chad Davison, director of client solutions consulting at Fiserv, creates “balance sheet leakage” reports to inform his strategic discussions with bank executives. “We’ve been trying to understand from an organization perspective where the dollars are leaving the bank,” said Davison in a pre-conference interview. Some of these dollars are going to other financial providers outside the bank, including cryptocurrency exchanges like Coinbase Global and investment platforms like Robinhood Markets. This awareness of where customer dollars are going could provide insights on the products and services the bank could offer to keep those deposits in the organization. “[Banks] have to partner and integrate with someone to keep those dollars in house,” said Davison, in advance of a panel discussion focused on technology investment at the Experience FinXTech event.
Increasingly, core providers — which banks rely on to fuel their technological capabilities — are working to provide more choice for their bank clients. Fiserv launched a developer studio in late 2021 to let developers from fintechs and financial institutions access multiple APIs from a single location, said Davison, and recently launched an app market where financial institutions can access solutions. “We want to allow the simple, easy connectivity that our clients are looking for,” he said. “We’re excited about the next evolution of open banking.”
Jack Henry has also responded to its clients’ demand for an open banking ecosystem. Around 850 fintechs and third parties use APIs to integrate with Jack Henry, said Wetherington, who doesn’t view these providers as competitive threats. “It’s a flywheel,” he said. “Competitors actually add value to our ecosystem, and they add value for all the other players in the ecosystem.” That gives banks the choice to partner and integrate with the fintechs that will deliver value to the bank and its customers.
As fractured as the financial landscape may be today for consumers, bank leaders may feel similarly overwhelmed by the number of technologies available for their bank to adopt. In response, bank leaders should rethink their strategy and business opportunities, and then identify “the different fintech partners to help them drive strategy around that,” said Benjamin Wallace, CEO at Summit Technology Group. Wallace joined Davison on the panel at Experience FinXTech and was interviewed before the conference.
The Federal Reserve published a resource guide for partnering with fintech providers in September 2021, and found three broad areas of technology adoption: operational technology to improve back-end processes and infrastructure; customer-oriented partnerships to enhance interactions and experiences with the bank; and front-end fintech partnerships where the provider interacts directly with the customer — otherwise known as banking as a service (BaaS) relationships.
Banks will need to rely on their competitive strengths, honing niches in key areas, Wallace believes. That could be anything from building a BaaS franchise or a niche lending vertical like equipment finance. “Community-oriented banks that do everything for everyone, it’s really difficult to do” because of the competition coming from a handful of large institutions. “Picking a couple of verticals that you can be uniquely good at, and orient[ing] a strategy and then a tech plan and then a team around it — I think that’s always going to be a winning recipe.”
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