Temenos, Cisco and Deloitte Luxembourg are among a group of companies setting up a due diligence, connectivity and testing platform to help the financial services industry in its efforts to work more effectively with fintech firms.
The initiative, called Fin5Lab, aims to create a trusted standard for pre-evaluation of fintech providers' products and services, enabling financial institutions to skip or at least shortcut elements of their procurement process.
This, the partners hope, will facilitate access, lower costs, deliver more efficiency, and lower risk for institutions, while expediting implementation.
Currently, according to research from core banking provider Temenos, the procurement process at financial institutions can take up to 18 months with a further 18 months of integration effort before a product actually goes live.
The unwieldy processes and sales cycle creates significant issues for fintech firms in relation to cash flow, resource allocation and growth, as well as putting financial institutions at a competitive disadvantage.
Fin5Lab will act as a dedicated sandbox for fintech solutions to connect to the Temenos core banking system. The infrastructure will be made available in a regulated and secure environment hosted by Telindus in Luxembourg using Cisco servers’ technology. Deloitte Luxembourg will offer a variety of due diligence checks, which can be requested by the fintech or the institutional customers.
Ben Robinson, chief strategy officer, Temenos, says: “This joint certification service greatly boosts our MarketPlace value proposition by giving clients additional assurance over the curation and integration work we do and as such we hope that it will accelerate the exchange of value between banks and fintechs.”