The recent influx of new tech and fintech providers in the marketplace is causing many financial services firms to review their technology offerings. Most new software providers offer a highly enhanced experience via user interfaces (UI) created to meet the needs of today’s target customer audience. Existing suppliers such as PSL are also considering how far we need to take our UI while ensuring the basic functionality of our solution remains at the forefront of the industry.

I’m sure if you want to you could find a gamified financial services (FS) solution, with eye tracking and a heat map aligned to a user’s mental model functional requirements and that would be great! But, would you really trust it to compliantly deal with an FS sale or manage a case and securitise it post completion?

An indication of the answer to this could be in the reluctance of the regulator to approve so many banking applications over the last 12 months. Data from FS Com in June reported that only four banking licences had been granted in the previous year compared with 14 the year before, despite the number of applications remaining largely the same. Could this be a symptom, not only of concerns over risk management, but also of some untested technologies suggested as part of the licence applications not being robust enough?

Established companies such as PSL have embraced open banking regulations and opened our platform to all sorts of innovation from a customer experience perspective via our development of APIs. This can create a highly versatile technology stack for clients. Our proven, highly automated back office servicing platform interfaces with all sorts of third-party software, including originations platforms.

A key area of any transformation programme is data migration and the same API technology has been developed to allow our clients to automate migrations of mortgage books from any account servicing platform onto the Phoebus servicing solution. This type of innovation hugely de-risks a major element of a programme and is proven, as many of our lender clients use it today to successfully migrate books themselves.

Technology will evolve to the benefit of what customers require. Generations Y and Z will have differing requirements to Generation X and millennials. But the one requirement they all have is correct financial information being presented to them in whatever UI is relevant to them.