Tag: Backbase

Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia – Bank Muamalat Malaysia Berhad (Bank Muamalat) has formed an extensive partnership with Backbase, a global engagement banking platform, as part of its strategic plan to become a next-generation digital Islamic bank for all. This collaboration, together with Mambu’s core banking transformation, represents a key milestone in Bank Muamalat’s efforts to reinvent its digital Islamic banking solutions. 

Innovating towards a unified Islamic digital banking experience by bridging silos and traditional banking processes, Bank Muamalat uses platform technology to achieve their aim of creating an outstanding customer-centric experience. With the Backbase Engagement Banking Platform acting as the main platform, Bank Muamalat can design distinctive and personalised customer journeys that are secure, consistent, scalable, and enable end-to-end processes like onboarding, financing, transactions, and backend consumer servicing and engagement. 

A digital Islamic banking super app that aims to improve the bank’s retail banking offerings is essential to its digital transformation. This significant change gives the bank the flexibility and control to carry out its long-term vision while enabling it to provide customised banking experiences catered to each individual customer’s preferences.

In addition to standard banking services, the aim is to provide integrated life empowerment elements that cover financial and faith-based components, as well as the guarantee of security and peace of mind in every transaction, in order to meet the needs of Malaysia’s broad consumer base. In the near future, Bank Muamalat also hopes to incorporate similar advances into its SME and commercial banking sectors.

The technical developments that are occurring are a result of Bank Muamalat’s dedication to innovation and constant improvement in all of its offerings, including services, products, and client experiences. The eight strategic thrusts that constitute the foundation of this change are: increasing customer centricity; facilitating Islamic banking for all; and accelerating business growth. These priorities highlight the bank’s goal of exceeding the ever-expanding requirements and expectations of its growing clientele.

Mambu for digital core capabilities and Backbase for modernization and customer-centric Engagement Banking are integrated into Bank Muamalat’s comprehensive cloud-based transformation. The bank’s financial services and product offers are improved by switching to a cloud-based model, which also saves a lot of money and increases operational effectiveness. Furthermore, by leveraging Mambu’s digital core to meet regulatory standards and fortify its security controls—both of which are critical for a financial institution—it helps Bank Muamalat’s developers to expedite software development cycles.

Mambu takes on a crucial role as one of Backbase’s most important core partners. The integration of Mambu’s core banking platform with Backbase’s engagement banking solutions creates a basis for banks of all sizes to break free from isolated, antiquated cores and go through a comprehensive digital revolution. 

Backbase and Mambu’s collaboration offer an efficient and resilient shift to contemporary banking protocols by providing a comprehensive, end-to-end, cloud-native digital banking solution built on an open architecture. Banks are better equipped to address the changing demands of the modern, tech-savvy customer and the larger banking environment with this unified offering. 

Speaking about the partnership, Khairul Kamarudin, president & chief executive officer of Bank Muamalat, said, “We are attentive to the current needs of our diverse consumer base and are dedicated to advancing financial inclusion and Islamic banking practices to be more modern, customer-centric, and digitally progressive. The strategic advantage of the Backbase Engagement Banking Platform lies in its ability to ‘adopt and build’, which aligns with our goal to launch the digital Islamic banking platform by the end of the year.” 

Meanwhile, Riddhi Dutta, regional vice president of Asia at Backbase, stated, “Islamic banks, especially in Asia, are keen to enhance their digital banking solutions to stay competitive. At Backbase, we’ve had the privilege of collaborating with Islamic banks across the globe, gaining invaluable insights into their unique needs and challenges. Our Engagement Banking Platform is designed with flexibility at its core, offering pre-built journeys and microservices that can be customized to meet the unique requirements of Islamic banking.” 

He added, “Our partnership with Bank Muamalat exemplifies our commitment to support Islamic banks in their digital transformation endeavors. Additionally, we hold a deep appreciation for Malaysia’s vibrant Islamic banking culture and dynamics, which stand as a beacon of innovation and growth in the global Islamic finance sector.” 

Lastly, Perminder Grewal Dallow, director of solutions engineering at Mambu, remarked, “Mambu is a key player in the cloud-native core banking space, today powering financial institutions across 65 countries. As one of the first traditional banks in Southeast Asia to embrace our cloud banking platform, we look forward to enabling Bank Muamalat to build innovative products and services, streamline IT processes, and craft exceptional customer journeys.” 

“The endorsement from Bank Negara Malaysia, the regulatory body for Malaysia’s financial sector, to advance this project underscores the trust and assurance in both Mambu and Backbase. We look forward to a strong partnership with Bank Muamalat as it modernises its technology foundation,” Dallow added. 

Singapore –  A staggering 70% of banks in APAC failed to achieve digital transformation for their banking platform, as reported by Backbase. 

The latest report challenges the long-standing default approach of building in-house solutions for digital engagement banking platforms. 

According to the data, 65% of mid- to large-sized banks in the region have opted to build their engagement banking platform in-house to attain digital transformation. And of this number, 70% of these projects have failed due to costly and lengthy in-house efforts. 

An overwhelming 80% of digital engagement platforms built in-house with a budget of $10 million also face underperformance and have not yielded the desired ROE in their digital initiatives. 

Despite having embarked on digital transformation since the 2000s, many banks in APAC remain at an early stage, failing to fully capitalize on its benefits and deliver compelling digital customer engagements.

Furthermore, the latest report also highlights a crucial disconnect between banks and their customers, where most banking products and offerings are deemed “me-too” and limited, resulting in shortfalls in digital experiences. 

As banks focus on locking in a high amount of resources to get banking platforms into shape, they fail to prioritize the creation of differentiated upstream customer journeys and experiences. As a result, customers face challenges accessing multiple services through disparate interfaces, lack a unified view of their portfolios, and endure lengthy onboarding processes. 

The demand for instantaneous approvals and streamlined digital processes remains unmet, while personalized experiences, segmentation, and relevant promotions based on customers’ lifestyles, life moments, and goals continue to elude them.

Additionally, backend operations suffer due to the lack of intelligent assistance in contact centers, leaving customers repeating information to different service officers due to the absence of a 360-degree unified customer view. 

However, the current report also found that the “Adopt and Build” approach is a pragmatic solution for banks to accelerate their go-to-market efforts, differentiating where it matters instead of reinventing the wheel by building from scratch. 

By adopting a collaborative platform and building upon it, banks can achieve a 40% faster time-to-market, where digital engagement banking platforms can be launched within 11 months, as compared to the traditional 20 months with a full “build” approach. In addition, “Adopt and Build” had proven to be more cost-effective, offering 2.3 times more than the traditional in-house “build” option.

The “Adopt and Build” approach was rated highest and had shown tangible advantages across six key metrics: market fit and differentiation, legacy risk, build risk, time to market, modernizing talent and IT skill sets, and regulatory compliance. This is in comparison to the “Build” and “Buy” approaches.

The in-depth report draws insights from 125 banks and 316 CIOs in APAC to offer a full regional perspective on digital transformation. Backbase commissioned IDC InfoBrief for the report. 

Ashish Kakar, research director of financial insights at IDC Asia Pacific, said, “Building in-house has been a de-facto strategy by banks, but it’s no longer feasible to deliver to the pace and scale that is required to be competitive. The complexities that come with the extensive amount of data layers, channels, features, upstream and downstream integration that needs to support legacy and modern systems to manage and orchestrate sophisticatedly is where in-house implementation breaks apart.” 

Riddhi Dutta, regional vice president at Backbase Asia, also shared, “A true platform comes with all the hygiene requirements from market fit, to security and regulatory compliance, to being versatile and customizable to support each bank’s unique customer needs. The platform is a composable fabric providing modularity and re-usable data and journeys for banks to help banks futureproof at scale.” 

Sydney, Australia – Backbase, a banking platform based in Amsterdam, The Netherlands, has recently appointed Iman Ghodosi as the new regional vice president for Asia-Pacific, where one of his main responsibilities in the new role is to drive the company’s international expansion, product development, and APAC market growth.

Part of that market growth expansion is centered around small and medium enterprises (SMEs), as well as in the retail, corporate and wealth management banking sectors.

Ghodosi was previously the vice president and general manager for APAC at enterprise software company Zuora. He has also worked at organizations SAP, Oracle, and Netsuite. He holds an MBA from the University of Newcastle in Australia and a Master of e-business from the University of Southern Queensland.

Speaking about his appointment, he said that he is thrilled to join the company, which enables the disruptors of the banking industry and incumbents alike, as well as offering an end-to-end omni-channel banking platform from the ground up using open standards to support the digital transformation journey of any sized bank.

“With over 120 strong team members in the region, we will continue to ramp up investments in the next several months, hiring for key roles in ASEAN, ANZ, Hong Kong, Japan, Korea, and India,” Ghodosi said.

He added, “In a platform era of Grab, Netflix and Spotify, people today want the same self-service experience with access to their personal financials, anytime, anywhere. Such consumer habits, compounded by the pandemic have disrupted the financial services industry and nowhere in the world do we see it more than in Asia Pacific. Backbase is primed to address this real need, helping banks to adopt and build modern, cloud-native digital banking platforms to keep pace with changing consumer demands, gain a 360-degree view into banking behaviours, and grow market share.”

Meanwhile, Jouk Pleiter, CEO and founder at Backbase, said, “As we continue to make inroads into the global financial services sector, I’m pleased to welcome Iman to our leadership team and look forward to his team capitalizing on the growth opportunities, while supporting banks in orchestrating seamless banking experiences for their customers and employees.”

Backbase has a team of almost 1,500 people spread across 22 countries and 15 offices, including offices in Singapore, Sydney, and Tokyo.