July 3, 2017 at 09:14FinWin-2017: competition of fintech projects and recent trends in the banking sector
On June 22, in Moscow, at the Digital October Center, for the second time, the annual forum-exhibition of ecosystems and marketplaces for financial and related industries FinWin 2017 was held .
The event brought together top managers of major banks, financial organizations, representatives of companies interested in partnership, and the press. The discussion topics, like a year ago, concerned banking ecosystems and the possibilities of expanding the list of proposals through collaboration with advanced fintech projects.
Despite the seriousness of the topics discussed, the forum was held in the format of “bankers without ties”. The atmosphere of the event pleased with its ease: many speeches were accompanied by jokes, and discussions were conducted in an informal manner.
Photo source: official groupFutureBanking on Facebook
One of the most intriguing events of the FinWin forum was the contest of projects. The aim of the competition was to select some of the most promising projects that have significant potential for cooperation with banks. The jury included leading fintech experts from the largest banks in Russia - Otkrytie, Raiffeisenbank, Tinkoff, Alfa-Bank, Sberbank and VTB-24. The contest participants presented their projects, revealing the benefits of services that could contribute to the development of banking ecosystems.
The winners were the projects “My Capital”, “My Broker” “iQChannels” and “Altkraft”. Let us dwell on the presentations of the winning companies in more detail:
Photo source: FutureBanking official group on Facebook
My Capital
The project “My Capital" is a mobile marketplace of financial instruments. The ecosystem consists of more than 10 mobile and desktop applications implemented for the operating systems iOS, Android, Windows and Mac.
The creators of “My Capital” is a full-cycle company from Novosibirsk, with many years of experience in creating and promoting applications, which, undoubtedly, is the project’s strength. The team came up with the idea of their product, simply putting themselves in the place of the consumer - an ordinary user who wants to have a simple answer to a direct question in the spirit of “Siri, where should I invest 300 thousand rubles?”. This is the standard that, according to the speaker, is worth striving for. In words, it’s easy to implement something similar, but at the moment there are no solutions on the market that would make automated and at the same time personified selection of financial offers for a potential investor.
By the way, the My Capital team includes not only developers and marketers, but also financiers and scientists from the Novosibirsk Academgorodok. Together, they are developing an adaptable intelligent system based on neural networks, which, according to their forecasts, will help bring this scheme to life.
Developers, attracting organic traffic from mobile markets, plan to collect the necessary data about the user’s investment desires through applications in order to provide a specific person with the most relevant proposals for compiling an investment portfolio. One of the applications, bearing the same name as the project, offers the consumer assistance in selecting the optimal bank offer for deposits, the other helps to understand the stock market, the third - to master IMS and so on.
Photo source: The official Future Banking group on Facebook.
Banks offer the opportunity to promote services through an ecosystem of investment applications. The fact that the user is ready to take an additional step - installing the application to select the right product - is a guarantee for banks to receive a highly motivated client. At the same time, the conditions for integration are negotiated by the creators of “My Capital” with financial institutions individually, which provides the customer with the most convenient implementation format.
The project is very young, it is only six months old, but, as the jury's decision has shown, it is very promising. Currently, developers are working intensively on the development of a recommender system to increase the relevance of search results and develop predictive modules to clarify user needs.
Video of the report
My Broker
The first winner is followed by another winner - a long-established product on the market from a veteran in the financial sector, the BCS company - the intellectual application “My Broker” , which is positioned by the creators as “an exchange in a smartphone”. Unlike the “My Capital” project, this is not quite an ecosystem of applications, but rather a single product with the widest possible investment opportunities on the stock exchange.
The project arose as a response to the need of a novice broker in a simple and convenient tool for working with the stock market. The target audience of the product is, first of all, people who are not particularly knowledgeable in the field of finance, but are interested in finding options for investing. A preliminary survey showed that respondents were primarily afraid of the apparent complexity of interacting with exchanges and the uncertainty of the first steps.
"My broker" allows you to sell and buy stocks, bonds and other securities. Using an intelligent system, the application draws up an individual investment plan for the user. There are also many informative tabs such as the "Quotes" and "Currency Exchange" sections with the most advantageous offers. Opening a brokerage account is carried out directly from the application.
BCS analysts online can offer ready-made investment solutions or advise the user. The personal financial portfolio created by the user is a kind of widget with visual growth indicators. Developers guarantee the security of all financial transactions.
The application, originally created for private investors, may be an interesting option for financial institutions. “My Broker” is an open API and infrastructure ready for integration, which banks can use for their projects as part of the task of expanding the investment opportunities of their customers and the banking services marketplace. Altkraft
talk
video
Altkraft specializes in creating digital marketing products. The guys were the only representatives of this direction in the competition. The project presented at the exhibition is a synthesized platform for the automation of marketing and communications in digital channels. Data security is provided by the client firewall: the platform is positioned as on-premise software. A platform is installed on the client’s equipment, which allows fulfilling the requirement of the Law on Personal Data No. 152-ФЗ.
The creators of the project promise a comprehensive solution to the following tasks: automation of regular communications with the client, split testing, analytics (more than 30 cuts per campaign), cost savings by reducing SMS and overall centralization of marketing and communications for all branches within a single platform (which is especially valuable to banks).
The project will allow banks to build a unified marketing strategy in all digital channels - email, push notifications, instant messengers, SMS, email, etc., to collect a history of user actions. Developers guarantee painless integration with partner sites.
To summarize, interaction with Altkraft gives banks a number of advantages: quick implementation, a unified marketing strategy, collecting and accumulating data about the user and his interests for further, more accurate targeting, the possibility of partnership schemes for attracting customers.
Video of the
iQChannels report Closing the
list of winners is the iQStore project - an ecosystem of tools for business interaction with a client called iQChannels.
The product is an omnichannel solution for a customer support service that supports interaction with a client: in a chat format via a website, Internet and mobile bank, instant messengers; video calls, e-mail, SMS. The introduction of the ecosystem will allow bringing the various channels into a single network, organizing and systematizing customer service, and will help to collect the history of communication in various channels in one place.
Such experience helps not only to systematize customer data, but also to increase the loyalty of consumers of banking services.
Report video
Photo source: FutureBanking official Facebook group
In addition to the four projects presented, Technosoft, Art Bank, Freedom24.ru, BrainySoft, 7 Seconds, Loan Application Operator, Money for Deal, VentureClub also took part in the competition. Each of the decisions aroused the interest of the audience and the jury. For example, specialists from BrainySoft created an added value aggregator for various types of financial organizations: online stores, banks, microfinance organizations. The platform provides an extensive set of ready-made integrations for providing loans for the purchase of goods in real time and subsequent work with customers.
As for the FinWin 2017 program, it consisted of three sessions codenamed “The Experience of Ecosystem Leaders”, “Ecosystem for Small and Medium Businesses” and “Banks Are Looking for Partners”, as well as two panel discussions on “How to Build a Better Ecosystem for the User” and “ What services do entrepreneurs need? ”
Surprisingly, there has never been a talk about cryptocurrency: the forum was a kind of “golden mean”. There were no noisy advanced technologies, however, it was still about the future of banks and modern solutions.
During the discussion about the content of the concepts “marketplace” and “ecosystem”, the participants quickly reached a consensus: banks use the term “marketplace” to mean some related services that they can offer their customers. Ecosystem in this context implies a certain bundle of tools, platforms and services, where the most favorable environment for the client is created.
Today, most banks conclude that in conditions of high competition, in order to keep the customer, you need to be able to offer the consumer as many “goodies” as possible, creating marketplaces for related non-banking services. In fact, these additional features can be anything from paying utility bills, fines and taxes to buying concert or plane tickets. The main thing is that the user sees them as a convenience for themselves.
Such measures allow banks to:
Photo source: official FutureBanking group on Facebook.
Domestic and foreign top managers of banks and high-end fintech specialists spoke during the sessions. For example, Mikhail Lomtadze, representative of the board of the Kazakh bank Kaspi, member of the Board of Directors of Binbank Alexander Filatov, project manager of the Tarantool Data Grid Mail.ru Group Denis Anikin, head of the department of the Center for Technological Innovations of Sberbank Andrey Aristarkhov and others. A detailed overview of the presentations is presented in the article “To the bank as to a store, or What customers want” .
Let us dwell on some recordings of performances that may interest the readers of the Habr.
The report by Nikolai Adeev, the representative of Artsofte on the topic “Misconceptions in the formation of marketplaces or where the ecosystem begins” turned out to be interesting both in content and in the format of the presentation.
Nikolay immediately made a reservation that by the term “ecosystem” he means a certain set of frontal product environments that are somehow connected with each other, and that which the end consumer faces. He singled out three theses of the ecosystem: seamlessness and uniformity of the interface, a single way of identification, a comfortable way to move between these environments in a single window system. The following beliefs were included in the list of typical misconceptions:
It’s worth watching the presentation video , both for the informational content of the report itself and for the charisma of the speaker, who was able to capture and engage the audience with an informal presentation style.
The joint report of Binbank board member Alexander Filatov and Binbank Digital business development director Igor Gaidarzhi addressed both management issues and technological nuances. The presentation sounded tips on how to eat 10 banks and not become awkward, how to redraw the entire control system (spoiler: Gref couldn’t do it), and, of course, the omnipresent Agile was not deprived of attention either.
And finally, Sberbank. The head of the department of the Center for Technological Innovations of Sberbank Andrey Aristarkhov toldabout the private experience of using open API for the development of the organization. Implementing open APIs is a phased process. In general terms, it takes place according to the following scheme: the appearance of the open API stimulates the influx of external developers with fresh ideas of fintech products, and then applications executed by them (the formation of marketplaces takes place just at this mature stage of the project), which, in its turn leads to business expansion. In order to protect the company's data and reputation, Sberbank distributes partners working with the Open API into several levels of trust, each of which corresponds to a specific pool of rights and privileges.
In general, FinWin 2017 proved to be fruitful for enterprises interested in partnership, and provided a lot of interesting material for examination. During the discussions, it became apparent that the trends that were discussed at the last forum were strengthened over the year and will be delayed for a long time. Banks are trying to diversify their services and get additional value for customers, gradually turning into marketplaces of financial and non-financial offers. This trend stimulates interest in finding solutions to expand the list of services and integrate with them. Of the recent trends of the last year, we can note more attention to additional services for legal entities.
According to experts, the current offers on the market for individuals fully satisfy the needs of customers and to expand the list of solutions is necessary primarily for legal entities. Offering additional opportunities (for example, modern platforms for accounting operations or hosting) in addition to standard banking services, banks will be able to arouse additional interest of legal entities and encourage them to make decisions on cooperation.
The event brought together top managers of major banks, financial organizations, representatives of companies interested in partnership, and the press. The discussion topics, like a year ago, concerned banking ecosystems and the possibilities of expanding the list of proposals through collaboration with advanced fintech projects.
Despite the seriousness of the topics discussed, the forum was held in the format of “bankers without ties”. The atmosphere of the event pleased with its ease: many speeches were accompanied by jokes, and discussions were conducted in an informal manner.
Photo source: official groupFutureBanking on Facebook
Project competition
One of the most intriguing events of the FinWin forum was the contest of projects. The aim of the competition was to select some of the most promising projects that have significant potential for cooperation with banks. The jury included leading fintech experts from the largest banks in Russia - Otkrytie, Raiffeisenbank, Tinkoff, Alfa-Bank, Sberbank and VTB-24. The contest participants presented their projects, revealing the benefits of services that could contribute to the development of banking ecosystems.
The winners were the projects “My Capital”, “My Broker” “iQChannels” and “Altkraft”. Let us dwell on the presentations of the winning companies in more detail:
Photo source: FutureBanking official group on Facebook
My Capital
The project “My Capital" is a mobile marketplace of financial instruments. The ecosystem consists of more than 10 mobile and desktop applications implemented for the operating systems iOS, Android, Windows and Mac.
The creators of “My Capital” is a full-cycle company from Novosibirsk, with many years of experience in creating and promoting applications, which, undoubtedly, is the project’s strength. The team came up with the idea of their product, simply putting themselves in the place of the consumer - an ordinary user who wants to have a simple answer to a direct question in the spirit of “Siri, where should I invest 300 thousand rubles?”. This is the standard that, according to the speaker, is worth striving for. In words, it’s easy to implement something similar, but at the moment there are no solutions on the market that would make automated and at the same time personified selection of financial offers for a potential investor.
By the way, the My Capital team includes not only developers and marketers, but also financiers and scientists from the Novosibirsk Academgorodok. Together, they are developing an adaptable intelligent system based on neural networks, which, according to their forecasts, will help bring this scheme to life.
Developers, attracting organic traffic from mobile markets, plan to collect the necessary data about the user’s investment desires through applications in order to provide a specific person with the most relevant proposals for compiling an investment portfolio. One of the applications, bearing the same name as the project, offers the consumer assistance in selecting the optimal bank offer for deposits, the other helps to understand the stock market, the third - to master IMS and so on.
Photo source: The official Future Banking group on Facebook.
Banks offer the opportunity to promote services through an ecosystem of investment applications. The fact that the user is ready to take an additional step - installing the application to select the right product - is a guarantee for banks to receive a highly motivated client. At the same time, the conditions for integration are negotiated by the creators of “My Capital” with financial institutions individually, which provides the customer with the most convenient implementation format.
The project is very young, it is only six months old, but, as the jury's decision has shown, it is very promising. Currently, developers are working intensively on the development of a recommender system to increase the relevance of search results and develop predictive modules to clarify user needs.
Video of the report
My Broker
The first winner is followed by another winner - a long-established product on the market from a veteran in the financial sector, the BCS company - the intellectual application “My Broker” , which is positioned by the creators as “an exchange in a smartphone”. Unlike the “My Capital” project, this is not quite an ecosystem of applications, but rather a single product with the widest possible investment opportunities on the stock exchange.
The project arose as a response to the need of a novice broker in a simple and convenient tool for working with the stock market. The target audience of the product is, first of all, people who are not particularly knowledgeable in the field of finance, but are interested in finding options for investing. A preliminary survey showed that respondents were primarily afraid of the apparent complexity of interacting with exchanges and the uncertainty of the first steps.
"My broker" allows you to sell and buy stocks, bonds and other securities. Using an intelligent system, the application draws up an individual investment plan for the user. There are also many informative tabs such as the "Quotes" and "Currency Exchange" sections with the most advantageous offers. Opening a brokerage account is carried out directly from the application.
BCS analysts online can offer ready-made investment solutions or advise the user. The personal financial portfolio created by the user is a kind of widget with visual growth indicators. Developers guarantee the security of all financial transactions.
The application, originally created for private investors, may be an interesting option for financial institutions. “My Broker” is an open API and infrastructure ready for integration, which banks can use for their projects as part of the task of expanding the investment opportunities of their customers and the banking services marketplace. Altkraft
talk
video
Altkraft specializes in creating digital marketing products. The guys were the only representatives of this direction in the competition. The project presented at the exhibition is a synthesized platform for the automation of marketing and communications in digital channels. Data security is provided by the client firewall: the platform is positioned as on-premise software. A platform is installed on the client’s equipment, which allows fulfilling the requirement of the Law on Personal Data No. 152-ФЗ.
The creators of the project promise a comprehensive solution to the following tasks: automation of regular communications with the client, split testing, analytics (more than 30 cuts per campaign), cost savings by reducing SMS and overall centralization of marketing and communications for all branches within a single platform (which is especially valuable to banks).
The project will allow banks to build a unified marketing strategy in all digital channels - email, push notifications, instant messengers, SMS, email, etc., to collect a history of user actions. Developers guarantee painless integration with partner sites.
To summarize, interaction with Altkraft gives banks a number of advantages: quick implementation, a unified marketing strategy, collecting and accumulating data about the user and his interests for further, more accurate targeting, the possibility of partnership schemes for attracting customers.
Video of the
iQChannels report Closing the
list of winners is the iQStore project - an ecosystem of tools for business interaction with a client called iQChannels.
The product is an omnichannel solution for a customer support service that supports interaction with a client: in a chat format via a website, Internet and mobile bank, instant messengers; video calls, e-mail, SMS. The introduction of the ecosystem will allow bringing the various channels into a single network, organizing and systematizing customer service, and will help to collect the history of communication in various channels in one place.
Such experience helps not only to systematize customer data, but also to increase the loyalty of consumers of banking services.
Report video
Photo source: FutureBanking official Facebook group
In addition to the four projects presented, Technosoft, Art Bank, Freedom24.ru, BrainySoft, 7 Seconds, Loan Application Operator, Money for Deal, VentureClub also took part in the competition. Each of the decisions aroused the interest of the audience and the jury. For example, specialists from BrainySoft created an added value aggregator for various types of financial organizations: online stores, banks, microfinance organizations. The platform provides an extensive set of ready-made integrations for providing loans for the purchase of goods in real time and subsequent work with customers.
Conference itself
As for the FinWin 2017 program, it consisted of three sessions codenamed “The Experience of Ecosystem Leaders”, “Ecosystem for Small and Medium Businesses” and “Banks Are Looking for Partners”, as well as two panel discussions on “How to Build a Better Ecosystem for the User” and “ What services do entrepreneurs need? ”
Surprisingly, there has never been a talk about cryptocurrency: the forum was a kind of “golden mean”. There were no noisy advanced technologies, however, it was still about the future of banks and modern solutions.
During the discussion about the content of the concepts “marketplace” and “ecosystem”, the participants quickly reached a consensus: banks use the term “marketplace” to mean some related services that they can offer their customers. Ecosystem in this context implies a certain bundle of tools, platforms and services, where the most favorable environment for the client is created.
Today, most banks conclude that in conditions of high competition, in order to keep the customer, you need to be able to offer the consumer as many “goodies” as possible, creating marketplaces for related non-banking services. In fact, these additional features can be anything from paying utility bills, fines and taxes to buying concert or plane tickets. The main thing is that the user sees them as a convenience for themselves.
Such measures allow banks to:
- Increase customer loyalty;
- invade retail and marketplaces like Yandex Market;
- receive additional income from commissions.
Photo source: official FutureBanking group on Facebook.
Domestic and foreign top managers of banks and high-end fintech specialists spoke during the sessions. For example, Mikhail Lomtadze, representative of the board of the Kazakh bank Kaspi, member of the Board of Directors of Binbank Alexander Filatov, project manager of the Tarantool Data Grid Mail.ru Group Denis Anikin, head of the department of the Center for Technological Innovations of Sberbank Andrey Aristarkhov and others. A detailed overview of the presentations is presented in the article “To the bank as to a store, or What customers want” .
Let us dwell on some recordings of performances that may interest the readers of the Habr.
The report by Nikolai Adeev, the representative of Artsofte on the topic “Misconceptions in the formation of marketplaces or where the ecosystem begins” turned out to be interesting both in content and in the format of the presentation.
Nikolay immediately made a reservation that by the term “ecosystem” he means a certain set of frontal product environments that are somehow connected with each other, and that which the end consumer faces. He singled out three theses of the ecosystem: seamlessness and uniformity of the interface, a single way of identification, a comfortable way to move between these environments in a single window system. The following beliefs were included in the list of typical misconceptions:
- The conviction of banks that they "own" customers and can easily sell them anything.
- Understanding the marketplace as an analogue of a separate portal / storefront / e-commerce.
- The belief that sites should be engaged in marketing and advertising, RBS - IT-specialists, while marketplaces represent the actual business.
It’s worth watching the presentation video , both for the informational content of the report itself and for the charisma of the speaker, who was able to capture and engage the audience with an informal presentation style.
The joint report of Binbank board member Alexander Filatov and Binbank Digital business development director Igor Gaidarzhi addressed both management issues and technological nuances. The presentation sounded tips on how to eat 10 banks and not become awkward, how to redraw the entire control system (spoiler: Gref couldn’t do it), and, of course, the omnipresent Agile was not deprived of attention either.
And finally, Sberbank. The head of the department of the Center for Technological Innovations of Sberbank Andrey Aristarkhov toldabout the private experience of using open API for the development of the organization. Implementing open APIs is a phased process. In general terms, it takes place according to the following scheme: the appearance of the open API stimulates the influx of external developers with fresh ideas of fintech products, and then applications executed by them (the formation of marketplaces takes place just at this mature stage of the project), which, in its turn leads to business expansion. In order to protect the company's data and reputation, Sberbank distributes partners working with the Open API into several levels of trust, each of which corresponds to a specific pool of rights and privileges.
In general, FinWin 2017 proved to be fruitful for enterprises interested in partnership, and provided a lot of interesting material for examination. During the discussions, it became apparent that the trends that were discussed at the last forum were strengthened over the year and will be delayed for a long time. Banks are trying to diversify their services and get additional value for customers, gradually turning into marketplaces of financial and non-financial offers. This trend stimulates interest in finding solutions to expand the list of services and integrate with them. Of the recent trends of the last year, we can note more attention to additional services for legal entities.
According to experts, the current offers on the market for individuals fully satisfy the needs of customers and to expand the list of solutions is necessary primarily for legal entities. Offering additional opportunities (for example, modern platforms for accounting operations or hosting) in addition to standard banking services, banks will be able to arouse additional interest of legal entities and encourage them to make decisions on cooperation.
