Having secured an e-money license, you are now focused on launching your digital payments services. Despite having a niche and well-defined scope of offerings and operations, you will still face competition from several types of financial services firms such as traditional banks, payment firms, fintech, and big technology firms, apart from other electronic money institutions. These firms offer products and services that compete with your product portfolio—including wallet accounts, payment accounts, remittance accounts, prepaid card accounts, etc.

Successful financial services firms invest in key capabilities to build market share and drive competitive advantages. Therefore, you need to look beyond digital payments and operate as not merely an electronic payments facilitator but as a financial services enterprise.

Success as a financial services enterprise is driven by certain key foundational capabilities that dictate your ability to stay competitive and grow market share. Here are a few key capabilities for reflection.

Business agility

Benchmarks: Can your e-money institution onboard customers in minutes? How easily and quickly can you launch and administer a diverse range of wallet and payment account products? How easily can you customize these products for a particular market, customer segment, or even an individual customer? Can you quickly roll out attractive offers and pricing to your customers? How easily are you able to drive effective cross and up-sell?

The use of automation and intelligence tools can significantly improve onboarding timelines. Capabilities that can help you quickly build and market innovative products are critical. The ability to customize products and roll out attractive pricing and offers at an enterprise scale can help you stay ahead of the competition. In addition, effective cross and up-selling of products and services to customers can help you fortify customer relationships and increase their lifetime value. Machine learning-driven intelligence can help scale effective cross and up-sell.

Connectivity and openness

Benchmarks: How easily and quickly can your e-money institution connect your systems with a partner firm or a digital ecosystem? Can you easily co-build innovative services with partner firms and explore new revenue streams? How easily can you embed your products and services in digital value chains and diverse digital touchpoints?

The ability to quickly integrate with third-party systems is critical to scaling the distribution of your products and services in the digital economy. It enables you to partner and creates innovative offerings that better address the diverse segments like retail and SMEs. As a result, exploring new revenue and business models becomes easier. Systems with fine-grained APIs and efficient API management are critical to enabling rapid integration of your systems with partner systems and digital ecosystems. In addition, systems compliant with evolving industry standards are also essential.

Operational efficiency

Benchmarks: How easily can you scale operations to millions of customers? Do your systems operate with zero downtime? How easily can your e-money institution offer services in multiple currencies? If you need to establish additional entities in different jurisdictions, how do you effectively manage the operational costs of these entities? How quickly can you comply with evolving standards and regulations in different jurisdictions?

Systems with proven reliability and scalability are critical to successful operations in the financial services industry. In addition, systems that can be easily configured to support multiple currencies and operate in multiple countries drive required operational efficiency. Out of box support for evolving standards and regulations are also critical in efficiently managing compliance. Lastly, systems that support multiple entities operating on a single instance also enable you to manage costs while driving scalability efficiently.

With cloud-based deployments and SaaS solutions, operating as a financial services enterprise no longer requires a large upfront capital investment. They allow you to set up enterprise-grade systems in a matter of minutes with a minimal upfront investment, lower IT management overheads, and optimize the total cost of operations over time. They also provide you with continuous access to the latest updates, enabling your e-money institution to stay future-ready with rich features and the latest technology. As a result, you can leverage the best enterprise-grade security and scalability and efficiently stay ahead of the market.

Success as an e-money institution requires business agility, enhanced connectivity, and operational efficiency. The cloud can help you upgrade your systems with the required agility, openness, and efficiency and do so cost-effectively. Set your firm up now for real success as a financial services enterprise!