Banks going digital: Designing frameworks for configurability, customization, and control

The only certainty in financial services today is uncertainty. How you adapt to a continuously evolving operating landscape can be the difference between success and failure. And while you may not have a crystal ball to foresee every change coming down the pipeline, you can build flexibility into your banking processes to adapt quickly when things change.

While banks going digital offers some of that adaptability, real flexibility depends on being able to configure and customize your technology framework so you can take control of the way you bring products to market.

Customers are cautiously optimistic, but tired. A Forrester Report found there’s a moderate level of optimism about post-pandemic recovery. 

As a result of living in a constant state of uncertainty, consumers are seeking out brands and products that make them happy and comfortable by offering reliability and trustworthiness. 

While the pandemic certainly accelerated the need for credit unions and banks going digital, it also changed how consumers work, travel, and live. The Forrester Report predicts that people want to enjoy device-enabled mobility, whether it be working remotely or gaining flexibility in how they access core services. 

These findings solidify the need for banks and credit unions to give customers the products and services that meet them where they are. And the key to creating a future-proof framework lies in the tools that give your teams configurability, customization, and control over all banking processes. 

Greater configurability allows your tech team to take new products and services to market without starting from scratch. Instead, they can begin with a template for a new workflow, application, or product experience and simply tweak it to fit their needs. This makes it easier for your financial institution to turn on a dime and respond to changing market conditions and consumer expectations through the delivery of contextually-relevant products.

Customization goes a step further, enabling your tech team to design and modify products tailored to specific brand, business, and technical requirements. For example, rather than having extra and even unnecessary questions in an application, it’s possible to change the flow so consumers only provide essential information. You can also deliver consistent branding across a product range and the end-to-end journey.

With greater configuration and customization comes greater control. You can gain more control over your financial institution’s branding, how and when you go to market, and  as a result, more control over the customer experience.

Our goal is to help credit unions and banks that are going digital with protecting their core, growing their business, maintaining costs, and remaining competitive. We provide a set of ready-made, purpose-built product tools, packaged in a platform that’s adaptable by design in order to help teams get to market quickly. Here are a few ways we deliver configurability, customization, and control features to our customers:  

• White-labeled solutions
  When financial institutions implement a variety of apps and solutions, it can often result in a disjointed experience for customers. Because Blend solutions are white-labeled, tech teams can quickly launch new product experiences across their lending portfolio — all while ensuring customers get a consistent, unified experience across products and channels.
• Low-code design tools
  Blend’s low-code design tools include a drag-and-drop interface, making it easy for tech teams to customize the app experience, restructure workflows, tap into native-first and third-party services, and much more.
• Ready-to-use templates
  Need to create a bespoke product for a specialized purpose? Blend’s modular architecture offers your tech team a wide variety of ready-to-use, purpose-built product, workflow, and integration templates right out of the box. By configuring and customizing these templates, your financial institution’s teams can quickly adapt to changing consumer behavior or market demands, and deliver contextually-relevant products in days, not months.
• Integrated data services and providers
  Your tech team can more easily help your credit union or bank going digital by making use of Blend’s comprehensive library of financial services — such as Blend’s specific technology, data, and service providers — to deliver seamless, end-to-end customer journeys. It makes things simple: integrate external services one time, and then use them across all business lines.
  
• Pre-built integrations and open APIs
  Blend’s integrations management feature gives your tech team the ability to seamlessly connect to your LOS, core banking system, or other systems of record, as well as to third-party service providers for credit, data verification, and more. There’s also flexibility to add in custom integrations. 

Blend’s combination of powerful features enables banks going digital to create, launch, and optimize new financial products with ease.

By putting flexibility first, we help you and your tech teams prepare for an unknown future, equipping you with the tools you need to not only understand new consumer demands, but facilitate faster speed to market, too.

And we won’t stop here. We are constantly evolving our platform to deliver the features and functions you are looking for, both now and in the future. We do this by ensuring that configurability, customization, and control are always at the heart of our offering.