Banks are working hard to adapt to the changing requirements of the financial market. To succeed, financial institutions need to embrace technologies that allow them to flexibly adopt evolving business models, and put customers at the center of every strategic move. Over the last years, cloud technologies and microservices architectures have emerged as a future-proof basis for this endeavor. With Financial Services Workbench, IBM enables financial institutions to accelerate digital transformation, utilizing these technologies to build next-generation solutions, digitize business processes and modernize products and offerings. We have asked various industry experts to share their views on the greatest value of the new offering for financial services.
There are a number of challenges the banking industry is facing today: changing customer expectations in an increasingly digital age, slow growth and decreasing profits as well as legacy core technology that inhibits innovation while the competitive pressure from fintechs is growing. Financial institutions are making use of new technologies to transform their IT architectures in a way that allows them to stay ahead of the game. They are moving towards more open and intelligent banking, offering tailored products that seamlessly integrate with their customers' journeys.
Microservices and cloud technologies have the potential to speed up the development of business solutions and at the same time enable companies to become more flexible and open. However, many enterprises struggle to see the value they originally envisioned embracing these new technologies: lack of experience and skills with cloud-native development prevent a smooth transformation. This is why IBM now offers Financial Services Workbench, a pre-built and curated offering for the financial industry that helps to build next-generation solutions faster. It brings business and IT together in a collaborative environment to create cloud-native solutions based on microservices architecture principles.
As a longstanding IBM business partner and expert for software solutions in the financial sector, knowis has supported the development of Financial Services Workbench from the beginning. We have asked experts in different areas – from banking to software development – about their opinions on the new IBM offering. In a series of short videos, you get a wide range of views on how IBM Financial Services Workbench helps our customers – banks and financial institutions – to take banking to the cloud.
Our experts talking about IBM Financial Services Workbench
Ileana Honigblum, vice president of Sales & Marketing at knowis AG, talks about how IBM Financial Services Workbench supports financial institutions in keeping up with the pace of fintechs.
Torsten Spörl, head of Banking Solutions at knowis AG, sees IBM Financial Services Workbench as a chance for banks to push their digital agenda towards open banking.
For Michael Rehfisch, head of Professional Services at knowis AG, the greatest benefit of IBM Financial Services Workbench is that it helps to rapidly realize customer-centered business solutions.
Christian Sternkopf, vice president of Product Management at knowis AG, is convinced of the usefulness of IBM Financial Services Workbench, as it puts the business value in the center of cloud solutions.
The greatest advantage that knowis head of Engineering Michaela Santl sees in IBM Financial Services Workbench is the preselected choice of best practices and proven standards for building microservices.
For Stephan Kliche, client technical architect at knowis AG, it is a huge value that IBM Financial Services Workbench ensures that best practices for microservices architectures are applied.
Saja Darwish explains how IBM Financial Services Workbench supports her as a software developer in translating business requirements into cloud-native code.
Frank Muggendorfer, business analyst at knowis AG, also values the collaborative design and development environment of IBM Financial Services Workbench, as it helps to avoid misunderstandings between the teams.
Jörg Erdmenger, vice president of Engineering at knowis AG, comments on how IT operations benefits from using IBM Financial Services Workbench due to open standards and reduced IT infrastructure complexity.
Image Sources: Teaser and video: knowis AG;
Music: License-free music from www.frametraxx.de
