This is the 9th article in the blog series on Digital Transformation and Business Strategy for Financial Institutions, written by the Q-Lana Team. We have conducted our observations and analyses of prevalent trends, integrated with our experience, to shape the series’ structure and content. Our approach is grounded in common sense and a steadfast belief in evolutionary development. We kick off the series with insights into effectively navigating the realm of Digital Transformation. From there, we delve into compelling ideas for crafting a dynamic Business Strategy, tailored specifically for financial institutions. While our work so far focused on financial markets in lower and middle-income countries, it’s worth noting that the overarching concepts we present are universally applicable across all financial markets.
It is time now to introduce to you the Q-Lana Open Banking Platform which can play an essential role in the implementation of the institution’s Business Strategy.
From its inception, we have developed and expanded Q-Lana as a very comprehensive digital open banking platform that is fully configurable, easy to use, and modular. The platform is based on low-code technology, which makes it flexible enough to adapt to the specific needs of financial institutions and asset managers. Q-Lana provides a library of components that will be expanded over time, enabling financial institutions to build custom workflows for their products.
The Q-Lana platform offers flexible product-specific workflow management, including human and/or rules-driven decision-making, documentation, and document management. It also includes tracking KYC information and company data, as well as integrating collateral management. Additionally, it has a communication function, knowledge management, dashboards, and reporting functions. This blog is not meant to be a sales event, rather, we would like to demonstrate how Q-Lana can be a perfect fit for a financial institution that embarks on a new Business Strategy and recognizes the importance of Digital Transformation.
When we created Q-Lana we looked at four key ingredients that ensure that Q-Lana addresses the specific requirements of a Financial Institution in the process of Digital Transformation:
- Expertise. You benefit from our team’s extensive 50+ year of experience in Financial Services, Lending, Risk Management, and Structured Finance. We have worked with over 100 financial institutions in all regions. This experience significantly shapes our approach to these concepts. Rest assured, our platform is built upon a foundation of robust and seasoned craftsmanship.
- Advanced Software Development. Our team has successfully developed and implemented ZeroCode, the low-code environment of our partner, Threshold. This gives the entire platform significant flexibility to adjust to the current environment of your institution and to allow you to follow the path of Digital Transformation.
- Track Record of successfully accompanying financial institutions on their path to digitalization provides us with the specific skills to avoid pitfalls and address challenges that appear during such projects.
- Strong belief in the value of existing financial institutions thanks to their experience and proximity to customers. This helps us build Q-Lana around the particularities of a financial institution engaged in local and regional environments.
Looking at the system structure of the various components for digital transformation, you can see that Q-Lana is placed right at the center, integrating well with the Data Analytics structure that we have described in an earlier blog. This is thanks to the fact that Q-Lana’s platform is built, integrating APIs and Microservices. In the same way, Q-Lana can partner with any system that offers Omni Channel Banking. We can offer our own partnerships or work with other companies. We integrate with external sources, such as credit bureaus, national ID centers or other official sources. And of course, we blend well with existing Core Banking Solutions.
We can work with you on replacing existing solutions but can also benefit from existing data structures and other software components that have already been installed in the institution. Q-Lana provides a solution that maintains the value of your existing software components where appropriate and economically reasonable.
Looking at the structure of the Q-Lana Platform gives probably the best insight into the various components we have integrated. Let’s have a look at the various components:
For contacts or individuals, we offer the ability to integrate KYC/AML checks, risk assessment, including scoring, based on demographic and financial information. We track business and personal relationships, which can become the basis for relationship pricing and risk management. We track ESG and impact information and have multiple configurable checklists to derive a broad range of information used for marketing and risk management.
For companies we equally track information around KYC/AML for multilayer company structures, identifying the beneficial owners. We have a detailed company analysis based on qualitative and quantitative information about products, suppliers, customers, competitors, and management. We have an integrated financial statement analysis including ratio analysis and comparison against benchmarks, forecasting models, and structured risk assessment tools. We continuously develop new applications for our customers.
In the same way, we track information around facilities and collateral, keeping this part short, so as to not overload you with information.
Areas of which we are particularly proud are our early warning system and our loan processing/workflow. The EWS includes sophisticated covenant monitoring, multilayer reporting, and reminders. For the workflows we have full flexibility between automated/ individual/ committee-driven decisions, tracking of committee decisions and minutes, and the ability to run multiple workflows in parallel.
As we are implementing the platform, we have continuously engaged in activities to enrich the quality of the lending process. For some of our clients, we’ve introduced improvements at any stage of the process between the client acquisition application approval processing monitoring, collection, and special servicing. We have integrated for example the concept of business canvas or SWOT analysis as well as sector-specific checklists, we have provided intelligent decision support and approval tracking, covenant monitoring, risk rating, and scoring as well as contextual intelligence by comparing a transaction to existing exposures, pre disbursement checklists collateral valuation, IFRS9 valuation as well as multi-level monitoring and watch list maintenance.
We definitely see digital transformation as a journey that can work in multiple stages, based on the client’s capacity and budget. This can include the digitization of existing operations from which we derive and learn insights before we start developing and adding new advanced tools. We give you the example of one of our clients where we are in an ongoing process of implementing and advancing the platform over multiple years, based on an agreed timeline.
In summary, you can see that we are not only preaching the ways to improve a financial institution’s positioning and digital transformation, but we actually have the tools and the experience on hand to help you make those visions real. At Q-Lana, we are committed to making banking better.
With this, we like to and this chapter of the block and will continue with one final chapter which expands on the idea of risk sharing.
You can find the video version of this article below!
