Posted on Author Peter Mukulu Categories Digital Commerce, Digital Lending

Banking as a Service (BaaS) and Top Financial Services Trends to Watch Out for in 2022.

The rapid wave of digital transformation set forth the transition of banks from rigorous to responsive, conventional to digitally savvy, and more receptive to change than ever before. Besides just being digitally established, they are moving fast-forward towards innovation and bringing a change in the industry practices.

Over the last few years, the banking sector has gone through an inevitable transformation as more and more fintech businesses come into the market. Financial services are evolving to the point where new products, channels, partnerships, and opportunities are being created. At the heart of this digital storm, lies the concept of Banking as a Service (BaaS).

So, what is Banking as a Service (BaaS)?

In simple words, Banking as a Service (BaaS) is the provision of banking products and services through third-party distributors. It is an end-to-end approach that uses APIs to connect fintech companies and other third-party organizations to a bank’s system. This helps such third-party Fintech organizations build innovative financial services upon the provider bank’s regulated infrastructure while enabling open banking services.

Banking as a Service (BaaS), disaggregating the traditional banking value chain.

The typical structural functions of a bank as we all know are accepting deposits, lending deposits to businesses, remittance, and payment processing. To facilitate these, banks require huge investments and other physical assets like property, infrastructure, etc. All these processes create gridlocks.

BaaS is bringing revolutionary changes in the finance industry by reconfiguring the value chain and promoting new sources of growth. FinTech companies & Non-banking Financial Services providers are working with traditional banks to create BaaS that enables innovative, specialized offers to get to market faster by combining the strengths of both institutions. With increasing problems of customers with existing banking barriers of regulation, security, and technology, Baas is delivering fast, agile and seamless offerings. The winning factor of BaaS is the ability to capitalize on technology investments and create value.

According to Finextra, the top companies that are actively pioneering BaaS strategies and have already experienced all the advantages first-hand are solaris Bank, Bankable, Starling Bank, Pi1, Green Dot, and BBVA.

The future of banking is driven by next-generation technologies, enabling customers to make seamless, safe, and rapid payments in order to meet their changing needs. Let’s look into some of the key trends that are disrupting the banking industry in 2022 and opening new doors of growth for banking.

Small business owner showing employee new plan on tablet computer

Embedded Finance or embedded banking: According to Juniper Research, the value of the embedded finance market will exceed $138 billion in 2026, from just $43 billion in 2021. Embedded finance is the seamless integration of financial services into a typically non-financial platform, enabling customers to use apps to avail banking services. Apart from the easy-to-use user experience, embedded finance is having a great deal of success because of its already existing broad customer base.  In addition to embedded payments, there are also emerging trends for embedded credit which allows customers to take credit within the non-financial platforms. For example, Amazon offers EMI options which purchasing any product. Moreover, embedded investments and insurance are integrated within the non-financial apps for a smooth customer experience. In fact, embedded insurance has the potential to increase the purchase of insurance for high-value products among eCommerce customers. Research reveals embedded insurance premiums to grow to over $10 billion in 2026, from just $3.8 billion in 2021.  

Emerging technologies in financial services: Advanced technologies like AI (Artificial Intelligence), Machine Learning, Blockchain, Internet of things (IoT) are rapidly transforming customer experiences by increased responsiveness, security, transparency, and time efficiency. Today, customers are exploring the benefits of open banking where they are thoroughly aware of their financial condition, they can plan investments, compare the alternatives and make better financial decisions.

Increase in Mobile Banking: According to 2020 mobile banking survey, approximately 58% of respondents indicated that they were visiting branches less frequently due to the pandemic; among them, over 61% indicated they were also using mobile apps more frequently. This trend is likely to continue as users are more comfortable than ever in availing mobile banking. Mobile banking enables users to have account information access, transaction access, investments, support services, and news and offers alerts. One of the biggest reasons for the rapid growth of this trend is because users can conduct almost all sorts of banking activities anywhere, anytime. This has further helped the bank to cut down on its operational costs by maintaining customer satisfaction.

To conclude, both banks and fintech’s are imbibed in a symbiotic relationship. The difference between the structure and functions of the two is even making the relationship more valuable. Along with the provisions of banking infrastructure, regulatory legitimacy, and the existing customers who still rely on banks; fintech brings the freedom to create, design, and experiment, offering user-friendly and tailor-made solutions for the customers. Finally, it would not be wrong to say that banks, fintech’s, and BaaS firms are most effective when they collaborate to reduce risk, maintain compliance, and provide the modern financial solutions that customers demand.

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Posted on Author Peter Mukulu Categories Property Management, Retail Sales Solutions

Technology revolutionizing e-learning platforms

According to UNESCO nearly 1.5 billion children and youth are out of school post the COVID-19 outbreak across 165 countries. With most offices having moved to work-from-home options and the ever-increasing unemployment rates, the online learning rate is going to grow exponentially among the working class too. With the COVID-19 threat still looming, there is still uncertainty regarding when schools and offices will reopen at full capacity again. The obvious inference from this is that E-learning platforms are going to see a sharp increase in their utility and user base in the near future.

E-learning platforms have been around for many decades, but haven’t been able to create the kind of ‘transformational’ impact that has long been promised. With the Coronavirus ‘black swan’ event, all of these remote learning platforms have gotten a sudden push into the mainstream, even in places where people could not envision such options earlier due to poor infrastructure and other socio-economic issues. 

The size of the E-learning market had already been pegged to cross USD 240 Billion by 2023, and now this projection is going to go up further. It is no wonder then, that in the coming days we will see newer companies entering the remote learning race utilizing emerging technologies like Artificial Intelligence, Big Data Analytics, Cloud Computing & Augmented and Virtual Reality to compete with established market leaders.  

Emerging technologies that are set to take e-learning solutions to the next level

Artificial Intelligence

According to Forbes, “Artificial intelligence can act as a virtual tutor and answer questions on the fly”.

Artificial Intelligence-powered E-learning platforms will be equipped to identify and assess learners’ levels of understanding and suggest customized paths of learning. Content analytics powered by AI makes personalized and learner-centered approaches possible – these would be based on the learner’s intellectual level, from kindergarten through higher education to even corporate training. Developing these solutions is no longer a daunting task with the advent of AIaaS or “AI as a Service” – now these solutions are easy to implement and come with enticing benefits. 

Augmented Reality (AR)

AR solutions bring more engagement, excitement, and innovation to e-learning platforms making content more consumable, enjoyable, and valuable. Augmented Reality techniques will be widely utilized to increase engagement for learners through activities, rather than the traditional read and write learning methodology. Augmented reality can also be used to offer customized learning options to suit differently-abled students with special needs to learn better, as AR includes gesture, voice recognition, and image rendering experiences.

Virtual and Remote Laboratories

Laboratories are some of the best places to learn – they allow students to acquire knowledge, experiment with different methods of arriving at answers, and experience real equipment, inculcating active learning and the development of skills based on solving challenges. Simulating labs virtually makes it possible for the users to stay connected through the internet to a remote physical system, and conduct web-based technical experiments. Students can extend their depth of knowledge in areas of control systems, programming, database, various other web-based applications, tools, and technologies. 

Virtual labs are also extremely beneficial to run experiments that are normally too expensive, unsafe to run, or unavailable.  They also allow students to repeat an experiment multiple times, giving them the opportunity to see how changed parameters and settings affect the outcome without wasting resources.

The Internet of Things

The number of devices that will be a part of the Internet of Things (IoT) by 2025 will be around 75 billion in number. The rise in IoT is going to further improve the e-learning experience. Already we see how mobile learning allows learners to access E-learning courses with absolute freedom of time and place. In the future, we are going to see more content in the form of images and videos.  24X7 access to the internet across a number of wearables will make teachers redesign assessment from “remembering and writing down”, to “evaluate and elucidate concepts on the go”.

If you’re thinking of using these technologies to your advantage to build or improve your E-learning systems and solutions, reach out to the expert technology consultants at Sarabi Tech. Sarabi has built spectacular EduTech platforms for organizations across the globe – with our years of experience and know-how in the latest technologies such as AI and AR/VR, Experion is certain to deliver the best solution with minimum time investment.

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