At iDENTIFY, we pride ourselves in our work for our clients and the community. From creating numerous solutions in the fintech industry, we lean towards banking and building the back-end infrastructure that promotes banking efficiency and faster-to-market. And seeing our clients save money and make better-informed decisions is what we strive for every day. Being recognized for our accolades makes our team ecstatic, as Forbes mentioned our company in their recent article on How to Become a Great Partner Bank in the BaaS space. Aside from our gratitude for mentioning us in their post, here's our take on the current state of BaaS. 

What is BaaS?

Banking-as-a-service, or BaaS, is known as a modular approach to supplying complete banking processes that allows brands to easily embed financial services into their products without having to worry about building banking infrastructure or obtaining a license. 

BaaS is a core part of our business model, allowing us to leverage core banking data for our esteemed clients by utilizing APIs and Webhooks to build the banks' core data infrastructure. We create unique solutions that improve operational efficiency in numerous ways. From a wide range of services, including payment processing schema, financial wellness, customer insights, and more - we always look for creative and innovative ways to improve our value propositions with our clients. 

With the above being said, the iDENTIFY team grows as we find similar team members who share the same vision. By leveraging cutting-edge technology, we create even more data engineering opportunities, enabling us to make even better solutions. Our decade of industry knowledge grants our leadership team the direction to provide our clients with better data and more opportunities to leverage their core banking data. 

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Benefits of BaaS

By leveraging the data cloud—especially for our clients migrating from FiServ to Snowflake—we can create solutions such as data schema for payment processing. While we won't get too much into the details in this post, it's essential to note that schema is a crucial tool for our clients, as data shipment is integral to a bank's success. 

What is Embedded Finance?

Along BaaS, another term comes up frequently: embedded finance. Now, what is embedded finance? Embedded finance integrates financial services within the offerings of non-financial companies, making banking solutions like payments and insurance accessible through the customers' touch points. Big companies such as Cash App and national banks leverage this approach for customer convenience. The embedded finance model offers more comprehensive services, encouraging customer loyalty and diminishing the need for separate institutions. As this is mainly seen in retail banking, iDENTIFY focuses on building some of these services out while creating data layers to present to stakeholders. 

Opportunities for Embedded Finance

The technology implemented for embedded finance also gives us opportunities to create solutions for our BaaS model. As our clientele is more focused on community banks with more of a local reach, we're ecstatic to work on these technologies as they provide our clients with a competitive edge. While leveraging modern technology, our clients have seen numerous benefits, which include saving costs and preventing fraud. While freeing up budget allocations by leveraging the data cloud, opportunities for compliance also come into play. As Simon Taylor mentioned in his post, the embedded finance business model is lucrative for all involved. 

Prioritizing Compliance

A significant part of all fintech will always be compliance. This is also where our team comes in. Our engineers are not only skilled in building the data warehouse and pipelines for banks, but we're also adept at staying up to date with compliance. Utilizing new technology, such as the data cloud, we encourage banks to migrate their core data to technology that assures their peace of mind. Similarly, we also understand that compliance is a vast, convoluted field. For this reason, we've partnered with NContracts to get their insights on these regulatory matters. 

Here's Lee's take on compliance. 

"We see more and more Fintech Sponsor Banks moving to a direct relationship model with their Fintech Programs. For us, this means more oversight and control into the data they are receiving from the Fintech Program without a middleware provider implementing any measures. This largely means the bank has to make more investments in technology and people to manage but in the long run it is the only way that makes sense to meet the demands from regulators while also reducing risk around fraud!"

The Future of BaaS and iDENTIFY

With BaaS being an essential part of our business, we at iDENTIFY leverage numerous opportunities for our esteemed clients every day. From creating pipelines to creating data warehouses that our clients can utilize for operational efficiency, our data engineering department stays at the forefront of customer-centric solutions. While advising our clients with comprehensive reporting by creating visualizations, our data analytics is nothing short of exceptional. The team members at iDENTIFY are always enthusiastic about pushing innovation every day.

Whether you're one of our esteemed clients or in our fintech network, we look forward to seeing how we can leverage modern technology for your operations. Contact us today and follow our blog to see how we're shaping the landscape of Fintech. 

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