How Could Banks Create Their Own Ecosystem With Partners And End Users?

Embedded finance: Provide your customers with the right financial product at precisely the right time

How can banks find their place in the embedded finance ecosystem?

To fully exploit the potential of embedded finance, banks need to build their own ecosystem with partners and end users in which all participants benefit from each other. This requires a profound transformation of the bank’s organisation toward a structure focused on openness and partnership. Embedded finance involves thinking about the entire cycle: from the potential partner’s wishes, through technological implementation, to the design of the product and delivery. The basis for this is an “API first” strategy that enables Embedded Finance products to be developed within the bank with the necessary priority.

How can we better understand customer needs and utilise data and new technological abilities to be relevant at the right time?

Consumers’ needs have changed significantly in recent years. Banks need to be present where the customer’s life takes place – revolving around the big and small events of everyday life. These can be e-commerce platforms, but also apps from mobility service providers, real estate websites, or comparison portals. Banks need to ask themselves how they can connect with the vast ecosystem of ideas that exist outside the banking world. Therefore, they should involve potential partners at a very early stage of development to really understand consumer needs and how banking data can help enrich products in a useful way. Only by taking the perspective of the end customer can banks and non-banks ensure that they are truly adding value to consumers.

What are the benefits of leveraging the embedded finance opportunities, and how does it result in customer satisfaction?

Embedded finance is beneficial for all parties involved. When banks cooperate with non-financial companies, they can tap into new target groups and address potential customers exactly where they are. Their partners increase the relevance of their own offering by integrating financial products and services and can fully align their value chain with consumer needs. But it is the consumers who gain the most: through Embedded Finance, they conveniently receive offers that are perfectly tailored to them. They can buy the right financial product at exactly the right time directly at the point of sale and do not even have to switch back and forth between different applications.

---

Joris Hensen is a Founder and Co-Lead Deutsche Bank API Program at Deutsche Bank. He is responsible for the Deutsche Bank API Program, which he co-founded in 2015. The Developer Portal of Deutsche Bank gives partners quick and easy access to more than 40 API products, enabling them to connect personalised apps and services and thus open up new areas of value creation.

Joris Hensen sees himself as an intrapreneur and is dedicated to exploring how Open Banking and Embedded Finance can change and improve people’s lives.

In his more than ten years at Deutsche Bank, Joris Hensen has worked as a project manager on various international projects. Early on, he became enthusiastic about innovations and trends and set up a corporate foresight program, in which he developed future scenarios and innovation strategies for Deutsche Bank. He has also been a guest lecturer at the Zeppelin University in Friedrichshafen on the topics of foresight, innovation and design.

Follow @joris hensen on Twitter or @jorishensen on LinkedIn.