Watch the Episode of The Fintech Show Featuring Tuum’s CRO, Edgardo Torres-Caballero
In an engaging episode of “The Fintech Show,” Tuum’s Chief Revenue Officer, Edgardo Torres-Caballero, joins leading experts from NatWest and Bank of Ireland to explore how today’s banks can enhance services for small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs). This discussion dives into the necessity of advanced technologies and personalized banking experiences in the rapidly evolving financial landscape.
Plus: Discover how Tuum is revolutionizing banking for small businesses by enabling financial institutions to meet the unique needs of this crucial sector.
Empowering Small Businesses
Small businesses are the backbone of our economy, yet they often face significant challenges when accessing financial services. Traditional banks struggle to meet the unique needs of these enterprises, leading to inefficiencies and missed opportunities. At Tuum, we’re dedicated to transforming this landscape by offering innovative, tailored banking solutions.
The Challenge
Small businesses require more than just a one-size-fits-all approach. They need flexible, responsive, and efficient banking services that can grow and adapt with them. However, many banks are constrained by outdated systems and processes that don’t cater to these dynamic needs.
Our Solution
Tuum is at the forefront of modern banking technology, providing a modular, API-driven platform that allows banks to innovate and adapt quickly. Our technology empowers banks to offer a more agile and customer-centric banking experience.
Key Benefits:
- Flexibility and Scalability: Our platform is designed to scale with your business, providing the flexibility to add new services and adapt to changing market conditions.
- Speed to Market: With our modular approach, banks can quickly roll out new products and services, reducing time to market and staying ahead of the competition.
- Enhanced Customer Experience: By focusing on the specific needs of small businesses, we enable banks to offer personalized and efficient banking solutions that enhance customer satisfaction.
Watch the Full Episode
Get inspired to transform your SME banking services and help your customers thrive in a competitive marketplace by watching the latest episode on The Fintech Show, featuring insights from Richard Tall, Head of Digital Propositions at NatWest, Conor O’Mahony, Chief Digital Officer at Bank of Ireland, and Tuum’s CRO, Edgardo Torres-Caballero.
Real-World Impact
Our advanced solutions illustrate how traditional banks can transform their services to better support small businesses. By leveraging Tuum’s cutting-edge technology, banks can streamline operations, introduce new, innovative products, and ultimately provide a better banking experience for their customers.
At Tuum, we’re committed to driving change in the banking sector. Our technology empowers banks to break free from the limitations of traditional systems and deliver exceptional service to small businesses. Join us in revolutionizing banking and supporting the growth of small businesses worldwide.
Get in Touch
Ready to innovate and enhance your banking services for small businesses? Contact us today to learn more about how Tuum can help you stay ahead in the competitive banking landscape.
Get in touch to find out more.
Building a Bank for Smaller Businesses – NatWest, Bank of Ireland and Tuum
[Full Transcript]
[00:00:00] Edgardo Torres-Caballero: You need to embrace digitalization. There’s no chance you can launch fast and you can attain and address end customer requirements if you actually don’t leverage the use of digital platforms these days. You’ve got to be able to integrate through APIs into other systems in the market, for better experience in the onboarding process, for validating the risk components behind this. There’s a bunch of different fintechs that have better technology at these things. You can reduce the impact in your business as you are enhancing the potential of a better experience for the customers. I think digitalization is fundamental.
Second component is, by digitalizing and embracing new technologies, you can actually leverage and find a way to enhance your data analytics capabilities. While not more complex, but it’s on the table at the moment, artificial intelligence. It has a bunch of different value propositions out there. Even if you’re not ready today to do all these things, your platforms have to allow you to do these things in due time. I think that’s fundamental.
From the SME side, I think they have a need for better and faster services coming from financial institutions that actually addresses their needs. No longer one-size-fits-all. I think it’s fundamental. That’s why the data analytics is fundamental for the banks to understand what are these campaigns that they’re running? What are these set of products that they’re offering? Hence attending to their needs better. That will definitely have an impact in growing the business.
[00:01:56] James Holian: It’s difficult to underestimate how diverse small businesses can be. You can get very heavily digital native small businesses, or small businesses that want to do things with a bit more human help. At NatWest, we really understand that. We’re able to open accounts at two o’clock in the morning, but we’re also there to talk to people if people want to do that.
We’re very proud to be opening about one fifth of small business accounts at the moment in the UK. We are the number one bank for small business in the UK, as we really understand the customers and what they need.
It’s difficult to say a bank is just a bank today. Banks are really technology companies. Our products are a series of zeros and ones. We’ll talk about banks being banks, and we’ll talk about branches, treasury, balance sheet, and all of those things, but technology is the heart of everything that we do today. That’s technology we build ourselves, that’s technology we buy from others. If you look at the marketplace in terms of the different competitors that are out there, there’s some almost pure technology plays with very little people or human sides around them. What we’re trying to do in NatWest is bring together all of the best bits of technology, whether built by ourselves, built by others, and create fantastic customer propositions that work for customers.
[00:03:04] Edgardo Torres-Caballero: By having modern technology and deploying in the cloud, that’s a big component into this. A second component is you’re perceiving a service. It’s a software as a service, we maintain it. We support upgrades on the platform, and you’re always up to date, because this is on a continuous release model. From that perspective, you will not become legacy, and this is a key component to this.
In Tuum you’ll find a platform that is functional. It allows you to launch today, but also grow, maintain in the future a modern platform, which allows you to grow with the business and then you can enhance it. At the same time, you get the benefits from other platforms: SaaS, real time system, API, RESTful API base. The cost effectiveness of a SaaS OPEX perspective on a business like this is a fraction of the cost of running traditional systems or mainframe systems in banks.
[00:04:04] Niall Devlin: Businesses have had to deal with Brexit, with COVID, with a very unstable political environment across the world with multiple different wars. But businesses are really resilient, and they will look for the positive in every challenge. But the current factor that’s impacting businesses today is just a higher interest rate environment. The cohort of customers that has impacted most have been those customers who have savings and have deposits. For the last 15 years in an ultra low base rate environment, they haven’t been fit to earn as they would have liked on their deposits and their surplus liquidity.
What we are seeing and what we are supporting customers with at Bank of Ireland is helping them manage their funds better, helping them make their money work better for them, and helping them maximize the return that they have on their liquidity. Technology is a critical enabler for us at Bank of Ireland, helping support our customers bank with us when and where it suits them. That could be for simple things like checking a balance, or it could be for more complex tasks like applying for a product, opening a new account, applying for lending, etc.
But it’s really important for us at Bank of Ireland to continue to invest in our digital infrastructure, so that we can help support our customers achieve efficient and effective customer journeys for all of the tasks that they want to complete online.
But whenever we listen to our customers, our customers will tell us that not only do they want and need an efficient digital journey, but they also really value the in-person service that we offer through our branches and our regional business centre network. For us to be fit to effectively serve all of our customers all of the time, we need to continue to invest in the in-person services and the branch and business centre network, and also the digital services that customers will avail off.
[00:05:49] James Holian: More dynamic and more responsive banking services is what small businesses need. We at NatWest understand that. If you open a NatWest account, you’ve probably already used four or five different fintechs and just going through that account opening journey in terms of how you operate with NatWest. We completely appreciate the best way to do the best things for our customers is through a partnership approach.
We also have significant numbers of fintechs within our organization, whether that’s FreeAgent, the accountancy software package that is free for all NatWest, Royal Bank and Metal customers, and things like Till, where we’ll take payments on a tap to pay basis just on a phone.
People often talk about how difficult it is for small businesses, and it is difficult for small businesses. That said, those small businesses have been tremendously resilient over recent years, whether that’s through COVID, through things like the war in Ukraine, Brexit, cost of living crisis, all of those things, the life has been difficult. But small businesses have been tremendously resilient.
In terms of NatWest and how we can help, there’s a number of things. One is using our data, thinking about using our data and giving prompts to customers, suggesting whether they should have their savings in an instant access account or a notice account or a time deposit. There’s very different levels of interest rates available for small customers for that.
The other one is helping customers gain access to finance, enabling them to borrow. A lot of small businesses don’t borrow as much as they might. We saw a huge amount of new lending through the COVID lending schemes, through the bounce back loans. As those are rolling off, we’re trying to help small businesses think about raising finance, being able to grow their business and do more and more through uncertain times.
Last of all, it’s worth saying that uncertain times aren’t ever going to go away. It might feel more uncertain than ever before right now, but probably 2025, 2026, they’ll probably feel even more uncertain.
[00:07:30] Niall Devlin: Having a really strong digital presence is key for all banks in the marketplace we operate in today. But whenever we listen to the feedback that our customers give us, they will say that the physical presence we have is a key differentiator that differentiates us from fintechs, for example.
If you look at the market today, fintechs are really good and have a key role to play on the financial ecosystem. However, their offering doesn’t suit everyone at all stages. But for us at Bank of Ireland, our ambition is to be the national champion bank on the island of Ireland. That means that you’re fit to support businesses large and small, businesses very tech aware and businesses less tech aware, and businesses that are struggling as well as businesses that are on point. That’s something that we take really seriously, because we are a key part of the financial infrastructure here in Ireland, North and South.
We in NI, we partner with Catalyst. Catalyst are a leading tech and science hub based in Belfast and in Derry. What they want to do is they want to help new starts, they want to help businesses scale, and they want to help businesses grow and develop innovative products that will be world leading. We also then work with Young Enterprise NI to deliver enterprise education to young people. In the last 10 years, Young Enterprise NI have provided education to over 50, 000 people. I think that’s really tangible evidence of how we are helping encourage entrepreneurship in NI, and how we will generate the next wave of entrepreneurs here.
[00:09:04] Edgardo Torres-Caballero: Partnerships and ecosystems in the modern world, where you have digital platforms, is a necessary requirement to be competitive. We are part of that. We’ve announced recently multiple different alliances. We are in AWS’ marketplace, we are operating with Google in the Middle East. We are through partners deployed in Azure in multiple different jurisdictions.
We are agnostic, but in a way with the experience. Even though the youth of our company, we’ve managed to operate them on multiple different digital cloud providers out there. We launch connectors to their systems to facilitate for especially fintech companies and start-ups to move faster.
We see many of these things in payment space. Connections to Central Link, connections with MasterCard or many other key systems or providers out there in the market that allow for seamless transacting requirements from our clients to happen.
Again, I think it’s within the context of a modern platform. It’s modular, it allows you to use whatever products within our product set that are needed from the banking perspective, be it either payments or lending or accounts. A modern platform would allow you to reduce the TCO of launching new initiatives. The studies where you’re launching projects and it takes four years, five years, and the cost is unbearable, are finished. I think there’s no chance any institution can survive these days doing these things.
The competition is very fierce out there. It’s a bunch of fintechs that have proven that these things can be done effectively. By now, many of them are even profitable. They’re no longer just depending on funding rounds or debt. It’s been proven in the market. Hence, I think the traditional institutions have definitely to take a look at it and make sure either through launching operations on the side, enhancing and having core banking operations cohabit with existing systems. Today this is possible. You can have a multi core strategy ultimately, because the TCO is cost efficient, which allows you to launch fast and you can address a specific market, grow them.
Why not if in due time you’re going to have a strategy to migrate some of the other technologies? You can do that, but in the meantime, you are in a position to address a specific market segment, trends, and business requirements. For the SME segment, which is a thriving opportunity out there in the market, there’s no way you can do these things efficiently if you don’t have a modern platform, like a core digital core banking system power this.