Today, Intuit Financial Services announced its new online and mobile software-as-a-service platform that provides financial institutions more flexibility to meet their customers' needs. The new platform will enable Intuit's more than 1,250 customer financial institutions to seamlessly incorporate solutions created by third-party developers or bankers themselves via application programming interfaces, or APIs. Some Intuit customer financial institutions have already taken advantage of this capability by integrating small business solutions, third-party investment brokerage services or bank-built mobile apps to their digital banking experience.

In addition to supporting more third-party solutions, Intuit's new banking platform provides financial institutions with:

Segment-specific capabilities to personalize a customer's experience and deliver insights to help him or her save money.
Improved navigation so people can complete banking tasks quickly and easily.
Robust and flexible branding capabilities.
Improved authentication, resulting in stronger yet easy-to-use security measures.
Dynamic speed to market.

"This isn't the static SaaS of years ago," said Al Ko, vice president of product management for Intuit Financial Services. "Between our wealth of data and a platform that's able to seamlessly include third-party contributions, we'll be making the experience better and better for consumers and small businesses while they sleep. This gives Intuit financial institutions the technological flexibility they need to achieve higher customer engagement."

Intuit data shows that customers now interact with their financial institution via the digital branch more than any other way. A recent Intuit internal study showed that Intuit's financial institutions' online customers interact with their financial institution's website approximately 10 times per month. When mobile is added, users interact roughly 19 times per month. And, those who access using onliusing online banking, mobile banking and tablet banking access their accounts approximately 30 times per month.

"People already use technology to get and create personalized experiences across their lives; we update our own profiles, mix our own music and decide which third-party apps we want to download," said CeCe Morken, senior vice president and general manager of Intuit Financial Services. "Banking should be just as accomodating. Yet no one provider can solve every problem for every person by itself. Opening up empowers a financial institution to incorporate the contributions of others, solve a wider array of specific customer challenges and, ultimately, delight those they serve."