Unlocking banking transformation with Finxact and Google Cloud

As the banking industry rapidly evolves, many incumbent financial service institutions find themselves in a bind. They must develop and launch new products and services to keep up with customer demands (and nimble new fintechs), but the core systems they use — many developed decades ago — are unable to do so with the speed and agility they need. 

Successful digital transformation requires cloud-native applications to take advantage of the speed, scale, and flexibility of the cloud. Modern, cloud-native digital core banking systems provide real-time access to data to improve business decision-making and customer experience while also opening up opportunities to leverage additional cloud technologies around machine learning (ML), analytics, and artificial intelligence (AI). But moving an entire core banking system of record from mainframes on-premises to the cloud is a daunting undertaking, and banks are understandably reluctant to commit to relatively new technologies without having them prove their reliability at any scale.

The partnership between Finxact and Google Cloud helps banks of all sizes bridge this gap. Finxact delivers cloud-native core banking-as-a-service, enabling fast, streamlined innovation without technology upheaval. By deploying Finxact on Google Cloud, financial service institutions can take advantage of the platform’s industry-specific solutions to maximize the value of their data for insights, innovation, and exceptional customer experiences, while meeting strict security needs. The partnership brings these capabilities together on a single platform that can also support a hybrid and multi-cloud strategy.

Finxact is an open banking API solution engineered to support the scale and performance requirements of the largest U.S.-based financial institutions. As described in Finxact’s recent paper, its cloud-native core banking system provides 100% accessibility to all data and functions via a robust set of modern APIs. This makes it the ideal platform for banks and their partners to rapidly deliver new experiences by creating products on demand and integrating new services as needed using their own or third-party solutions without restriction.

Written in Go, the modern runtime language authored by Google, Finxact serves as an advanced system of record for financial institutions that require high-velocity transaction processing against multi-position accounts of any asset class or currency. The solution leverages Google Cloud technologies like Apigee API management, Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE), and Security Command Center to provide highly secure, scalable, interoperable, and extensible services to its customers. 

Finxact has 14 clients utilizing its platform in production at the time of this writing. Over the last few years, it has seen an unsurprising but notable tendency exhibited by its clients. Many of those clients are incumbent regional banks that, as described earlier, are feeling the pains of maintaining legacy cores. The case for why to transition to a next-gen core has been made rather convincingly, but many banks are still trying to figure out the best approach to getting started in a way that doesn’t introduce undue risk. Finxact has noted that most of its financial service institutions are finding a ‘trailhead’ approach to be pragmatic — one that suits their individual needs and ensures near-term benefits and outcomes, while locking in the learnings to inform next steps and decisions in a progressive and incremental fashion. 

This approach offers multiple advantages: It serves as a learning opportunity to better understand how a cloud-native core banking solution can work, a proof of concept for larger initiatives down the line, and an agile way to test the viability of new product ideas in the real world — all without disrupting current operations. 

If a bank determines that Finxact meets its core banking needs, it can prioritize a set of customer journeys and rebuild them as cloud-native microservices while slowly deprecating legacy services in parallel. This approach can also now take advantage of new technologies like Google Cloud’s Dual Run, which enables customers to simultaneously run workloads on legacy and cloud-based services, allowing them to perform real-time testing and quickly gather data on performance and stability with no disruption to their businesses. Alternatively, a financial institution may launch a new digital bank or brand in a targeted area powered by Finxact. This approach allows financial service institutions to get immediate value from the modern tech at a small, manageable scale. 

Banks can also take advantage of additional customer insights, by deploying Finxact on Google Cloud and leveraging BigQuery and VertexAI. Finxact provides real-time visibility into operations, allowing banks to make informed decisions quickly and easily. This can help reduce operational costs and improve the customer experience. Meanwhile, Google Cloud helps banks fuel data-driven transformation with speed, scale, and security by leveraging the platform’s built-in AI and ML capabilities, including BigQuery and Vertex AI. 

Whatever path to modernization an institution chooses, it needs a robust ecosystem of technology partners to deliver an end-to-end banking solution. In addition to being able to leverage built-in AI and ML capabilities such as BigQuery and Vertex AI, Google Cloud and Finxact each have an ecosystem of fintech partners that can support financial services organizations through this period of disruption and accelerated digital transformation. 

The partnership between Finxact and Google Cloud is revolutionizing core banking. By leveraging the capabilities of each partner, banks can benefit from increased security, scalability, and reliability while rapidly developing new products and services, improving customer experiences, and increasing efficiency. With hybrid and multi-cloud flexibility, your cloud strategy won’t be locked down. Instead, your institution will keep pace in today’s open playing field with a platform for innovating and migrating while evolving at your own pace.

To learn more about Finxact on Google Cloud, visit the Google Cloud for financial services page.