Drupal 10 is here with its all-new features and several benefits and what’s more exciting is that upgrading is easier than ever. There were 771,407 websites using the Drupal core project as of December 25, 2022 (using the Update Status module). The graph below shows the weekly project usage of D10 (Fig. 1).

Releasing D10 in December 2022 came with its own sets of advanced features and benefits, most prominently-

• Allowing site owners more time and control over their content by stabilizing CKEditor
• D10 came with Symfony 6.2 which includes bug fixes and improvements over the current 6.0 release
• The security teams have comparatively lesser work to do with this release

From the looks of it, D10 is the best version of Drupal with its Claro theme, front-end Olivero theme, New starter kit theme, decoupled menus, and much more.

If you’re looking for Drupal Site Audit this handy guide can help you remain at the top of your game by improving security, and performance and preparing it for upgrades and enhancements. Regular monitoring and site audits can help you stay updated with Drupal best practices.

Why should you consider a Drupal site audit?

While Drupal site upgrade is essential to stay in tune with the latest features and modules, a holistic site audit also helps with maintaining site security and personalization on the site among other challenges.

Drupal 10 release has opened an exciting box of new features that can help a site gain a competitive advantage.

If you have an older site version (Drupal 7 or 8) and are ready to migrate to Drupal 9 or the latest versions, it is a must to go for a site audit to ensure a smooth and successful migration, and also to understand the current status of your site. It is important to understand the obstacles to CMS migration and ways to overcome them before you decide to migrate to Drupal 9 or Drupal 10.

Site Audit for D10 Upgrade: Know your eligibility

Whether or not you are eligible for Drupal 10, a site audit report can suggest the same (Fig. 2). If you’re using the older versions like Drupal 7, 8, or 9, the road to upgrade to D10 means that the following requirements must be met:

• Your site must update to at least Drupal 9.4.4
• Sites using CKEditor 4 should upgrade to CKEditor 5 in Drupal 9.4 or 9.5
• Sites should update their .htaccess files
• Sites should update any copies of .htaccess or web.config
• New developer feature to show debug markup for render caching has been added. Sites should ensure that their site-specific services.yml includes the new section
• Site owners can update their settings.local.php to maintain consistency and forward-compatibility
• Drupal 10 requires PHP 8.1 or higher
• Drupal 10 recommends Composer version 2.3.6 or higher

Drupal Site Audit Checklist

The on-site Drupal 10 audit components can include the following checklist, such as mobile usability, speed, accessibility, and hosting infrastructure, among others (Fig. 3).

Apart from these, there are domain checks which become as critical as on-page site audit. These include:

• Site Map
• SSL Certificate
• WWW resolution
• Robots.txt Indexing

Drupal Site Audit Report

Conducting a Drupal site audit can help you upgrade to Drupal 10, or maintain the site for performance, SEO, and security. We hope the checklist assisted you to understand what needs to be done to upgrade to D10 and maintain the basic hygiene of your website.

Would you wish to need assistance from experts in performing a thorough Drupal site audit to check eligibility for Drupal 10, send us a message and we’ll connect with you shortly.

GrapeJS is a multi-purpose, open-source Web Builder Framework that is used to combine multiple features and tools to create HTML templates without the need for coding. GrapeJS is seen as a replacement for WYSIWYG editors, which are often pitched as good content editors. However, the drawback with WYSIWYG editors is that they are inappropriate for creating HTML structures.

Why GrapeJS?

While GrapesJS was initially designed to be used inside Content Management Systems for creating dynamic templates, instead of being used as just an application, it is an extensible framework that can now be used for any purpose.

At a first thought, GrapeJS looks like just another page/HTML builder, but in fact, it is a Web Builder Framework that enables creating create a drag & drop-enabled builder of HTML-like structure. These HTML-like structures can then be used for lot many content-creation purposes, such as Newsletters, Native Mobile Applications, Native Desktop Applications, and PDFs.

GrapeJS enables users to create complex templates with set of elements like <tag some="attribute">... other nested elements ...</tag>. GrapeJS builder is easily customizable around this attribute and can hence, be used independently in the applications.

How to show GrapeJS Editor Content in PDF

Our requirement to show GrapeJS Editor Content in PDF emerged from the project we were working on, and where a requirement like this erupted. This blog is a tutorial on how to show GrapeJS Editor Content in PDF. It if for all the software engineers and developers looking for a unique solution to this problem statement. So let’s get started.

Prerequisites

Install npm and node by following this article:

https://docs.npmjs.com/downloading-and-installing-node-js-and-npm

Step 1: Setting up React

To get started, you must first set up React by following the below mentioned article-

npx create-react-app grapesjs-canvas-to-pdf
cd grapesjs-canvas-to-pdf
npm start

Above steps will create react project called grapesjs-canvas-to-pdf in current working directory, after which we can now get started with GrapesJS.

Step 2: Install GrapesJS

To install GrapeJS, you need to follow the below mentioned steps:

grapesjs-preset-newsletter,react-to-print and dangerously-set-html-content libraries

Install above libraries in project by executing the command mentioned below in the project folder:

npm i grapesjs grapesjs-preset-newsletter react-to-print dangerously-set-html-content

Step 3: Create folder structure & files

Create following folder structure and files inside project for basic grapesjs setup (Fig. 1).

Put the following code in /src/components/Editor/index.js for basic initialization of GrapesJS.

Follow the code mentioned below in /src/components/Header/index.js to create site header for out application.

Replace the App.Js with below code and clear the App.css to add previously built components. 

Once you have completed the basic setup, the UI will look like Fig. 2

Step 4: Create the plugin for showing the pdf

Add the folders and files for pdf plugin and pdfpreview component as shown in Fig. 3 below.

Put the following code in /src/components/Editor/Plugins/PDFPlugin/index.js to create a PDF preview plugin which will show button on top panel of GrapesJS editor as shown in below screenshot.

Put the following code in /src/components/Editor/Plugins/PDFPreview/index.js to create a component that will take editor content as a props and be used by print dialog in order to show the content.

Edit the  /src/components/Editor/index.js file and add the plugins and functions for calling pdf preview update the Editor file.

Once you have finished all the aforementioned steps, you’ll be able to see the pdf preview button in top panel as shown in Fig. 4

Step 5: Basic web page creation using GrapesJS

If you clicking on button without any content, you will be given an alert as shown in Fig. 5 here.

Therefore, let us now put content in canvas. We’ll put header, two sections with image plus text and footer (Fig. 6).

Step 6: Check webpage pdf in browser’s default print capability

All the above mentioned steps will allow us to check webpage PDF in browser’s default print capability ignoring rest of the UI of web and focusing only on content of webpage created in canvas of GrapesJS. After creating this let’s click on PDF button (Fig. 7).

Now it’ll show web page in browser printing dialog with content in the canvas ignoring the header and GrapeJS UI. We can also change the PDF configuration for page dimension, layout, etc.

Conclusion

GrapesJS is an excellent Open Source Web Builder Framework that allows implementing powerful and simple Style Manager module, enabling independent styling of the required component inside the canvas. The tutorial on how to show GrapesJS editor content in PDF will help developers explore further styling options in the projects.

If you have a query regarding our tutorial, or would you wish us to add more, reach out to us.

 

WebRTC (Web Real-Time Communication) is the technology that empowers sites and applications with the ability of audio-visual media. The technology allows one to capture and optionally stream video and audio in real-time while exchanging arbitrary data between browsers without having a need for an intermediary.

WebRTC as Real-Time Streaming Solution: How business can use it

WebRTC is widely used to deliver the user experience. From Google Meets, Google Hangouts, and Facebook Messenger, to Discord, and Amazon Chime, WebRTC has found a place in some of the known massive applications. Businesses can deploy WebRTC for various functionalities such as-

• Remote content delivery 
• Contact centres
• E-commerce
• Healthcare
• IoT
• Education

WebRTC delivers promising benefits like low latency delivery, easy collaboration, and secured multi-user audio-visual calls. WebRTC can be integrated into an organization’s website easily, and can also be embedded into mobile applications, company websites, or marketing banners published on the Internet as ads. The solution makes collaboration simpler, and also facilitates external parties to arrange web conferencing over the Internet without having a need for a separate application or plugin.

While WebRTC has emerged as an innovative, real-time streaming, and disruptive communication solution, this high-quality technology also needs prior testing to ensure unified communication or seamless P2P connections. But what exactly is WebRTC testing solution?

WebRTC Testing Made Easy

WebRTC testing is rather unique as challenges are multi-fold. Not only is the web-based application tested, but the system should also be able to test the voice and audio across the browsers. This makes it a very expensive problem to solve as high bandwidth and resources are needed to run a WebRTC application.

However, to test the same we need systems to run multiple video and audio-receiving applications concurrently which are then monitored accordingly. This further augments the resource capacity of the systems required to test. There is no way to launch a project without getting the capabilities of the system tested out before it goes live to thousands of users.

What is the objective of the WebRTC Testing Solution?

The Rise of start-ups across industries and enterprises led to many WebRTC applications in the market, but most of them need attention to get performance results for scaling to make a better product for the end users. Creating a product to handle a large audience using WebRTC is difficult and time-consuming, and testing it is an even more difficult process.

Hence, defining objectives for WebRTC testing is a must. Before hopping onto the final product, an organization, therefore must address the following objectives for WebRTC testing-

• How to ensure real-time streaming that is the fastest, easiest, and most scalable?
• How do you know how many peers/streams your WebRTC Application has?
• A way to automate the regression/sanity testing for Webrtc applications
• To get an overview of How your WebRTC application will behave in different scenarios like network, VM, etc.
• Get a proper understanding of Server size and connected users to scale the server based on requirements.

Testing of an application based on WebRTC contains various levels such as-

• Sanity: just to validate basic functionality on diff environments to be sure about its working condition
• Regression testing: at the time of the release all the previously developed and new features need to be tested before the targeted release. Regression is something that can be pushed manually as well as automated.
• Performance: Getting to know how the application will perform with a large number of users will be an outstanding achievement of the product and it needs to be done for all the applications handling a huge audience.

Sanity testing and latency of WebRTC applications can be done manually but regression and performance become a challenge for this type of application as it needs to be tested against each release and contains repetitive work.

Valuebound’s WebRTC Testing Solution

Conducting WebRTC testing for a product can be challenging but the devil rests in the details. Valuebound, when faced with a difficult challenge, went about with the following test plan to test an application with WebRTC technology built in-house. We needed answers to specific questions that arose from the application complications.

What are we testing:

• some basic details like video/audio streaming
• sent/received audio/video chunks
• WebRTC dumps from the browser
• Average loss packets/jitter/latency

Basic statistics against the performance of the application

• Valuebound’s WebRTC testing solution can be scaled for any number of users to test the performance of the application
• Automated interoperability test scripts run on any platform.
• It supports all web browsers- Chrome, Firefox, Safari, Edge, and Opera on all OS (Linux, Windows, Mac, iOS, and Android), mobile native apps on Android, iOS, and also the desktop native apps on Windows and macOS.

Valuebound’s WebRTC testing solution can help you automate your regression test and can be used for performance testing with some modification, which becomes a huge success parameter even before your product launch.

Get started with WebRTC Load Testing

We are continuously orchestrating WebRTC testing solutions to help our clients create, run, and analyze their WebRTC applications for a unique user experience in the simplest, fastest, and most affordable way.

When doing content delivery for interactive events, live auctions, remote movie, and TV post-production, broadcast production, sports, bidding, betting, the metaverse, AR/VR, gaming, and more, load testing for real-time streaming applications becomes essential.

Get started with WebRTC testing solutions with us. Learn more about real-time streaming that is the fastest, easiest, and most scalable for multiple concurrent viewers. 

According to the McKinsey survey, technology investments are proving their worth, especially at companies making more tech-based changes and bridging more of the technology-business divide. This impact is visible across four main organizational benefits, which include:

a) realization of new revenue streams, 
b) increased revenue from existing streams, 
c) reduced costs, 
d) improved employee experience

Out of these factors, people-focused plays (Fig. 1) bring in the maximum value of technology investments.

McKinsey survey also suggests that most companies across industries associate people-focused initiatives with value creation. In fact, 37% of companies are now focused on digitizing their end-user experience. So, the holy grail for most companies now is their talent strategy.

This blog explains how the pharma and healthcare industry can leverage digital transformation by delivering a total experience.

But what is a total experience? It’s a simple formula-

Total Experience (TX) = marketing content and strategy + UX Design + customer and employee experience (CX/ EX)

Our blog is for pharma chief digital officers (CDO), chief information officers, and other C-suite executives in the digital space that are trying to scale their organizations toward TX through digital overhauling.

The Greatest Barrier to Digitization in the Pharma and Healthcare Industry

The greatest barrier to the pharma and healthcare industry in going digital is the way organizations are structured. “There’s certainly a degree of risk aversion in trying new things through the implementation of digital solutions, whether it’s clinical trials or a commercial launch or a discovery project,” says Francesca Wuttke, the Chief Digital Officer at Almirall, a Spanish pharmaceutical company. Although the collaboration between biotechs, startups, and pharma is improving, the healthcare industry is still late to the party of digitization (Fig. 2)

The industry is often bruised by regulatory restrictions, which affects its mindset. Yet another barrier in scaling data and going digital is a lack of leadership drive or skill. While scaling databases and technology is at the core of most companies, they often forget to speak about change management.

“One of the biggest barriers is that you’re constantly being asked to prove the value of what digital has brought to the table. That could relate to really small, incremental-value projects all the way through to complete business model shifts,” opined Jeff French, Vice President & Chief Digital Officer, ViiV Healthcare.

There is also a vast difference in adopting digital analytics by domain or function. Leadership is a key factor to consider here. For example, in Biohaven Pharmaceuticals, a clinical stage biopharmaceutical company, the Marketing and Sales domain is well aware of the value and capabilities of digital transformation, but other functions are still developing their awareness. The Chief Technology Officer of the company, John McGill, says that what is needed is “pulling that all together into a more homogeneous, company-wide transformation ultimately to drive greater value.”

So this makes two things clear: a) change in culture and b) change in mindset are two factors that can drive digital transformation in the pharma and healthcare industry.

Talent Strategy: The Holy Grail of TX

Biopharma executives in the digital transformation panel discussion explained the capability and talent required for digital transformation in the pharma and healthcare industry.

In 2019, only 3% of the clinical trials out of 32,000 were digital or hybrid. Cognizant is projecting that over the next four years, that will increase to 25%—an increase of more than 800%. But it is essential to disseminate this message from top to bottom across business units in an organization. In the past 2 years, the discussion over digital transformation of pharma and healthcare industry has elevated to reach the boardrooms.

“It’s going to be a continuous transformation in pharma,” says Sanjay Parikh, Executive Vice President, Indegene. He further adds that the right kinds of change catalysts need to be added within an organization. The right shift hence comes from a complete shift in the business model.

Moving Data Across Different Business Units for Faster Digitization

It is essential for a pharma and healthcare company to share and leverage data within the organization. Opening, federating, and governance of data is at the crux of digital transformation so that the leadership can then align it and get the right people to handle opportunities when they appear.

How a pharma company can regulate and democratize data internally and create a single source of truth is the right question to be asked.

“The burning platform for pharma is moving faster, and being able to provide meaningful insights from that data and use it to fuel clinical trials and better commercial decision-making,” explains Patrick Roche, Chief Digital & Information Officer at Mallinckrodt Pharmaceuticals. He also explained that COVID was a catalyst of change in the pharma company because it not just fuelled collaboration but also helped break silos and increase the speed of retail delivery.

To go fast, a pharma and healthcare organization must have people or talent that know how to go fast. With a data management system, a pharma company can maintain a crisp vision toward its commercial strategy. It is from the top that the acceptance of data-driven decisions needs to be driven.

Import IT Talent from Outside the Industry

While the pharma and healthcare industry is used to seeing very long development timelines for products, when the word “digital” comes in there is also a natural expectation of faster time-to-market.

Creating a more collaborative network consisting of IT-savvy professionals with the right tools and technologies that help the pharma and healthcare industry can hence be an immediate way to digitization. So while the core business units can be focused on business imperatives, IT teams from outside the industry can stay tuned to strategy and deployment. Biohaven, the clinical-stage biopharmaceutical company, has worked on a collaborative model like this.

Industry experts believe the same. “In my experience, they can bring in new thoughts in terms of tools and technologies that we hadn’t even thought about using in pharma from a speed and capability standpoint, “ says Pickett, Jr., Chief Information & Digital Officer, Syneo Health.

Conclusion

Having digital transformation in the pharma and healthcare industry is more about solving the problems of business with processes, data governance, and technology. People with the right capabilities can embed themselves into this and understand the business issues that pharma companies are trying to solve.

Having an IT team from outside the industry means that a pharma company can have a nucleus of talent that also has a business standpoint and speak the language that everyone understands.

At Valuebound, we believe that curiosity is among the most important companions of digital transformation in pharma. Novartis in the UK has been investing in learning capabilities and embedding such systems into organizations, using frameworks from IT and tech to make the processes faster. If you wish to apply a similar model to your culture, speak with us and open new prospects of digitizing your business units.

Delivering the promise of a tech-enabled and digitally-sound business is a model that most companies struggle to deliver today. As CIOs look forward to overcoming building pressures to improve user experience, grant more secure and sustainable solutions, and enhance employee experience, we help you understand where to invest, how to define your business ambition, design your approach, and orchestrate sustainable change.

From automation to hybrid cloud, frictionless digital experience to decentralized finance, some of the core themes that are set to rule digital transformation trends in 2023 are explained in our blog. So let’s take a look at our list of what every business must ready itself for in 2023 when it comes to digital transformation trends.

The Metaverse

Forbes describes the metaverse as “a more immersive digital world.” While some may think of it as just Augmented Reality/ Virtual Reality (AR/VR), it is also about blockchains and decentralization. A world-renowned futurist, Bernard Marr says, “The term web3 is closely linked to various ideas of what the metaverse will be and is used to describe what many are calling a decentralized web.”

The Sandbox is a decentralized, community-driven platform, one of the finest examples of the metaverse. The Co-founder and COO of the company, Sebastien Borget considers The Sandbox one of the most advanced metaverse platforms to date. Immersion, 3D content, and platforms like The Sandbox are set to rule the digital transformation trends in 2023 and beyond.

Artificial Intelligence and Cybersecurity

Milind Wagle, EVP & CIO of Equinix opines that cybersecurity and artificial intelligence will continue to drive opportunities for businesses across industries, especially since the technology is becoming more decentralized and accessible. In 2023, a strong focus of AI would be on workforce augmentation, which means allowing employees to navigate the change around remote and hybrid work cultures by leveraging new tools.

Another form of AI in business to watch out for would be synthetic content. This means that a business harnesses the power of AI to create entirely new kinds of content like images, information, and sounds that have not existed before.

Frictionless Digital Experience

By tapping into the power of data, and smart APIs, and then driving an action that would enhance employee and customer experience is what is needed for a frictionless digital experience. Ellora Sengupta, VP & Head of Business Technology, Procore believes that designing customer and employee journeys through engaging, connected and frictionless digital experiences would be essential for CIOs.

To enhance productivity, it is imperative that businesses provide an intuitive, simple, and connected experience. All this would become even more important as more governments are interested in creating smart cities and smart countries that offer connected experiences such as smart homes, and intelligent and automated check-ins at airports, and hospitals.

Hyper-Automation and Hyper-Cloud

Automation can drive growth, enhance productivity, and generate cost savings during economic uncertainties. One example of this is Salesforce’s suite of automation technologies, which allowed its customers to save more than 100 billion hours every month. In 2023, however, automation is not enough. Organizations must take hyper-automation initiatives at the enterprise level with a more strategic approach.
“In the year ahead, I will also be looking to see more focus on hyper-automation – where organizations rapidly identify, vet solutions, and automate as many business processes as possible,” says Lisa Davis, SVP & CIO, Blue Shield of California.

The technologies which are already built are no longer supported at just the cloud level. Hyper-cloud requirements are needed, which means that organizations must fully automate the provisioning of infrastructure, storage, networking, and computing.

Decentralized Finance

DeFi is largely known to be driven by the rising need for individual control and ownership over personal finance. NFTs or Non-Fungible Tokens are digital assets based on blockchain technology, and they are the drivers of this trend. NFTs can completely change the way investing and transactions are done. DeFi is highly innovative and allows shared or fractional ownership. This technology also opens up a range of possibilities and opportunities for the finance industry.

Future Lies in Delivering Total Experience or TX

In 2023, organizations will have added pressure to deliver a seamless employee and customer experience to drive growth, generate more revenue, and seek customer loyalty. Organizations will hence, look to create a holistic digital experience that delivers TX or total experience encompassing not just customers, but also employees. There will also be a focus on resilient and agile outcomes with more focus on integration and automation.

If you are prioritizing a total experience through advanced tech stacks in 2023, speak to us and let us create a roadmap for a successful digital transformation of your business.

Banking as a Service or BaaS is a provision of facilitating products and services to customers through third-party distributors. The concept of BaaS functions by the integration of non-banking businesses within the regulated financial infrastructure. BaaS offerings enable new and specialized propositions and bring them to the market at a faster speed-to-market. Since these new propositions are built on the modern concepts of agility and specificity, they are displacing conventional banking offerings and disaggregating various profitable elements of the traditionally working banking value chain.

As a result of Fintech companies dominating the finance sector now, various incumbent banks are waking up to the potential of banking as a service. And why not? Stats on the financial market suggest that BaaS offerings are gaining ground as customer dissatisfaction grows with traditional banking models. Deloitte suggests that 30% of customers are considering switching banks, while 42% of customers have already used a Buy Now, Pay Later service also popularly known as BNPL. Moreover, the banks focussed on BaaS offerings have 2X Return on average assets (ROAA).

In this blog, the bank’s CMOs, CIOs, and C-Suite executives can gain insights to build customer-led journeys. But before we dive deeper into the subject, we must know what is Banking as a Service or BaaS, and more importantly, what it is not.

What is Banking as a Service?

Banking as a Service is defined as a business model where banking institutions enable fintech and non-financial businesses to provide financial products and services via the bank’s APIs. Connecting with banks’ APIs helps non-banks build innovative financial services upon a licensed and regulated infrastructure of the existing bank.

The concept of BaaS is deeply rooted in the increasing need for embedded finance. As a result, financial institutions started Banking as a Service as bundled offerings, which were often packaged as white-labeled or co-branded services. Today they are branded as embedded products. Non-Banking Financial Companies or NBFCs can use BaaS to serve their customers.

To make Banking as a Service or BaaS work, financial institutions or FIs require technology and capabilities since it is distributed to third parties via APIs and so it is based upon strong compliance and risk management.

BaaS is Not Open Banking

In our previous series on Banking as a Platform or Open Banking, we have discussed that BaaP is a different business model than Banking as a Service. The two terms are often confused because both involve the use of bank APIs by third parties and fintech companies. But the major difference lies in the objectives of BaaS and BaaP or open banking.

While BaaS allows third parties to integrate complete banking services into their product offering, BaaP or API-based open banking only allows third parties to use data for their product offerings.

Considering the Pain Points

Several traditional banks across the globe are concerned that when they distribute products or services through channel partners, it threatens their business relationship with clients. However, if end users or customers have already started adopting embedded finance in huge numbers, the banks have no room for not considering BaaS business lines.

Banks must look at the sunny side of this. The good news is that banks have that licensed and regulated infrastructure that fintech companies and NBFCs lack. Additionally, enabling third parties to distribute products and services through their APIs can be a low-margin and high-volume business.

Traditional banks are often seen struggling with cost structures that are based upon legacy technology and are managed through manual operations. Hence, to adopt a BaaS business model, incumbent financial companies must be willing to undergo digital overhauling. Fortunately, many banks have already started their journey.

Zac Townsend, who works with banking clients on creating digital businesses, writes for McKinsey, “ My work with incumbent banks suggests that more than two-thirds have undergone the digital transformation and modernization necessary to be competitive in BaaS.”

While it’s still a rising tide, one possibility with Banking as a Service is that it becomes pervasive as mobile banking or online banking. BaaS can evolve as a channel that every bank builds and maintains.

Why Banks Must Move Past the Status Quo: Lyft’s Case Study

The rising interest of traditional banks in BaaS is a result of embedded finance, which also explains why incumbents must move from the status quo. Let’s consider the case of Lyft's debit card. The Lyft Direct debit card is issued by Stride Bank, N.A., member FDIC, pursuant to a license by Mastercard International.

The debit card company offers excellent drivers for customers in the form of a strong rewards program. The result is customer experience improvements such as seamless account opening.  Behind the debit card offering of Lyft is a bank that:

a) Provides a debit card
b) Manages transactions in and out of the accounts, and
c) Handles regulatory compliance requirements for this product offering

Across the financial services offerings, including insurance, lending, and payments, the embedded finance offering like this is estimated to generate $230 billion in revenue by 2025, which is 10x increase from $22.5 billion in 2020, suggests Lightyear Capital Inc., a private, independent investment dealer.

Moreover, 11% of banks already have a BaaS strategy, 8% are in the process of developing one, and 20% are considering it, a Cornerstone Advisor, the expert banking consultants, survey of financial institutions found.

So the answer to why banks must move from the status quo lies in growth opportunities. On average, the banks which are currently offering BaaS have six partners and can support around 1.3 million account holders.

Overall, a sponsor bank that supports 1 million consumer accounts and 300,000 commercial accounts can easily generate a revenue of over $40 million annually, which calculates roughly $15 per consumer account and $71 per commercial account.

Cornerstone research estimates that the industry-wide, BaaS market could expand to over $25 billion in annual revenue in 2026. Forbes says, “This would go a long way to replacing the inevitable loss of overdraft fees the banking industry will face over the next five years.”

What’s So Important About Embedded Finance?

There’s nothing new about vertical integration, but historically the companies had integrated supply chain elements from within their industry only. What embedded finance offered is banking enablement into other industries. Digitization of banking led to the integration of banking into other industries by “embedding” banking software into non-banking companies. That is what’s new. And the interesting aspect is that it is beneficial for both financial institutions as well as non-banking companies.

The Road Ahead

A traditional bank could go the route of developing its own BaaS platform from the scratch, but for most banks, this doesn’t seem to be a viable scenario due to cost and time requirements. Additionally, the operational and technical challenges remain daunting.

This is paving the way for BaaS platform providers which can productize services such as account management, compliance, lending fraud management, and payments. Even for the fintech companies, going through the route of platform provider becomes significant from a cost and time perspective.

Unit, a BaaS platform provider says that working directly with banking infrastructure typically requires a cost of about $2 million and a time of 15 to 18 months to launch, with approximately $2.5 million in ongoing annual costs. But, working with a platform provider can also help fintech companies because it helps in reducing deployment time to less than 2 months and initial costs to $50,000, with ongoing annual expenses of around $50,000 too.

Strategic planning by a bank’s CMO or fintech companies can help reduce deployment time and cost. If you are scaling the change and looking for BaaS platform providers, Valuebound engineering capabilities can help you integrate embedded finance. Drop us a hello or reach out to our team with your inquiries.

Accenture says, “Those that treat Open Banking as a strategic growth priority will position themselves to deliver the seamless and engaging digital experiences customers want—and potentially boost revenues by upwards of 10 percent.”

A reasonably mature FinTech environment with existing use cases of API-led banking has emerged in recent years. This has led to the development of a conducive environment for financial services companies, banks, and incumbent financial organizations- collectively called the financial institutions or FIs- to consider how they can mature in the quest to embark on their API-based open banking journey.

In our previous two parts of the open banking series, we explained why banks should adopt API-based open banking and the challenges and opportunities in adopting the same. We also demonstrated it through the successful use cases of top banks like HSBC and ICICI.

Our collection of three-part series of experience-driven insights on successful API integration for open banking models can help C-suite executives of FIs and banks navigate their way into a thriving digital future.

APIs, as we clearly see, have grown beyond their initial definitions of just letting two systems interact with one another. Today APIs have evolved as a full-fledged suite of services that all leadership personnel must understand in depth to adopt open banking.

So, what should be your internal capabilities? What are the key tenets for implementing an open banking ecosystem? Through our blog, we discuss them and develop a market-ready strategy for implementing an API-based open banking business model.

Internal Capabilities to Gauge Before Implementing Strategy for Open Banking

Before formulating a strategy for an API-based open banking business model, executives must gauge internal capabilities first. A gap analysis is necessary to identify loopholes and internal areas for building capabilities. Key stakeholders must assess the following four considerations (Fig. 1).

• Technology Readiness- Assess the current IT infrastructure of the FI and the ease of API integrations.
• Customer Experience- Understand customer needs and align them with product or service offerings.
• Workforce Readiness- Gauge whether an organization has manpower capabilities to integrate APIs or not.
• Cost Implications- Estimate the cost of API integration and technology upgrade.

Fundamental Tenets of Successful Open Banking Implementation

Five considerations serve as critical tenets for successfully implementing API-based open banking ecosystem. These include data sharing, data privacy and cybersecurity, regulatory compliance, partnerships or interoperability, and customer experience (Fig. 2).

 

Data Sharing- Open banking is highly reliant on data sharing. It makes it possible for the customers to control the portability of critical financial data, which is shared with third parties for the ultimate benefit of customers. In addition, financial service companies can monetize customer data, given that open banking envisages secure data sharing. This can create another source of revenue for incumbent banks.

Data Privacy & Cybersecurity- Customer trust, market reputation and confidence, and service adoption- all lie at the heart of data protection. Compromising cybersecurity could be a costly mistake. C-suite executives can read our insights on the cybersecurity roadmap to gauge the risks and inculcate cybersecurity best practices. Hence, banks and financial services companies must ensure appropriate internal audits for data transfers to move toward open banking.

Regulatory Compliance- While developing and implementing an open banking ecosystem, there has been a differentiated approach of regulatory authorities across different jurisdictions. As a result, FIs must ensure compliance with data sharing, cybersecurity regulations, data privacy, consumer protection, and personal data protection.

Partnerships or Interoperability- Since API forms the premise of open banking, including banks and NBFCs, developing capabilities to strategize data, products, and services is critical. Following set standards in context with the security, customer experience, API, and operations eases the process of creating partnerships and interoperability.

Customer Experience- Open banking not only helps create additional revenue streams but also provides greater control for improved customer experience. This is possible through actionable insights based on data. Hence, creating customer-centric products and services becomes easier while reinstating customers’ trust in the brand.

Market-Ready Strategy for Open Banking

The average compounded annual revenue growth of banks and competing players in the Accenture study that utilize different business models (between 2018 and 2020) is

• 76% of digital-only players with non-linear models
• 44% digital-only players emulating traditional vertically integrated models
• <2% traditional banks with vertically integrated models

The revenue performance of digital-only, non-linear challengers is an inspiration for incumbent financial services companies, and banks for higher market valuations. So now the million-dollar question is how to facilitate a smooth “go-to-market”? Deloitte suggests three key areas that form essence of successful deployment of market strategy for API-based open banking (Fig. 3).

 

Developing Core Capabilities

As banks and financial services companies move towards developing core capabilities, their aim should be to develop an agile architecture that supports use cases for API enablement. Additionally, FIs must have organizational maturity for a seamless API management system, which includes API gateway, sandbox environment, and API lifecycle management.

To ensure optimum channel penetration and customer acquisition, banks and non-banks must have-

• Well-defined legal framework for liability and dispute management
• Capability building for personnel operating the system and acquiring the requisite skill set for APIs development
• Scalable, agile infrastructure to offer greater modularity and easier configuration
• Global FAPI (Financial grade API) and ISO 20022 standards to ensure adequate security controls
• Identification of verticals where API-enabled products and services can add value

Identifying and Prioritizing Relevant Use Cases

Financial institutions can leverage data to generate leads, cross-sell products, pre-, and post-delinquency management, risk assessment, and product development. Direct benefits of leveraging data for open banking are business augmentation, operational efficiency, improvement in asset quality, and cost optimization. For reaping all these benefits, banks and financial services companies must identify and prioritize the use cases to understand the relevance for their customers and the banks. Measure the intent to use, perceived benefits, and current experience for monetization, potential opportunity, and risk management.

Deloitte identifies the top 10 relevant use cases that form the basis of a successful market strategy for open banking. These are-

1. Wealth Management – High relevance to FI
2. Recurring payments – High relevance to customer
3. Sweeping accounts and micro-saving accounts – Medium relevance to FI
4. Credit risk assessment - High relevance to FI
5. NPA management and collections - High relevance to FI
6. Financial product aggregator - High relevance to customer
7. Spend management - High relevance to customer
8. Non-financial product aggregator – Low relevance to both banks, and customers
9. Automated overdraft credit - High relevance to FI
10. Automated payables reconciliation - High relevance to FI

Determining the Right Monetization and Pricing Strategy

The years to follow are promising for open banking, which is why banks have already started their journey toward API monetization. Banks can use robust pricing strategies for their competitive advantage by leveraging monetization opportunities and unlocking the full suite of API-enabled offerings.

Both free and premium APIs come with their own sets of monetization opportunities. Free-charge APIs facilitate services through third parties, which can help banks orchestrate unique customer experiences, intensify service penetration, and increase customer acquisition. Meanwhile, premium APIs monetization opportunities arise because banks can charge third parties for using them. Some of the pricing models for premium APIs can be

• Pay-per-use- No minimum fee, charge per call/per month
• Free + Premium- Free for basic; more information requires premium pricing
• Tiered-  Tiered pricing for pre-defined buckets
• Fixed fee- A fixed or percentage of the transaction paid to the API provider

In Brief

While the global open banking wave is relatively low tide right now, there is a change building at the bottom of the seabed. Accenture says that $416 billion in revenue will be at stake as the open data wave arrives, and banks must decide between surfing on the wave or riding it out with minimal damage. The leaders of open banking tomorrow shall be the ones who prioritize APIs, agile partnerships, data custodianship, analytics mastery, and trusted security.

Valuebound helps banks and financial services companies win in the digital ecosystem and get ready for what’s next. Talk to us to know how you can create a successful go-to-market strategy for API-based open banking.

Even though APIs have become a common denominator of digitization over the past few years, only 30% of the FIs were actually using APIs as of early 2021, suggests PYMNTS. So where is the challenge? To explore the growth potential, C-suite executives must also be aware of the global open banking situation. In this article of three-part series on open banking, we explain the challenges and opportunities of adopting API banking business model.

Matt Naish, head of the product strategy at FISPAN, a fintech company offering differentiated banking experience, says, “the lack of integration, generally speaking, is not a technical problem. The problem is with change management and process management.” He adds statistics to emphasize that “50% of customer relationship management (CRM) implementations fail — not because of the software but because of the inefficiencies of layering new systems over legacy infrastructure.”

Deloitte in its 2021 report, Open banking: Unleashing the power of data and seizing new opportunities underscores that data sharing is among the most critical challenges of open banking. The wariness to share data lies not just at the bank’s end, but also among the customers. The report says that cybersecurity and data protection are the top concern areas across all age groups, followed closely by wariness towards third-party access to data and transparency on data usage.

About 70 percent of survey respondents feel that greater emphasis should be made on data protection by institutions. More than 80 percent of respondents (who include multiple Financial Institutions, including banks and FinTechs, and customers) are uncomfortable with sharing the transaction history of accounts hinting toward a need for all FIs to assure customers that their data is secure.

So, we can safely say that the critical challenges of open banking are across 3 areas (Fig. 1)

• At the organizational level: Change Management & Process Management
• At the technology level: Running APIs with FI’s older tech infrastructure
• At the security level: Implementation based on regulatory favourability, industry maturity, cybersecurity, and data protection.

 

Open Banking Scenario in India: Case Study

India’s open banking or API banking scenario stands on a hybrid foundation. The retail banking industry and the government have collectively been involved to fuel financial development, and at the heart of this is an ambitious project called India Stack- an initiative that comprises several APIs and is aimed at bringing developers, businesses, fintech start-ups, and government at a unified software platform.

India Stack is a set of APIs (Aadhaar, eKYC, UPI, Digilocker, and eSign) that allows governments, businesses, startups, and developers to utilize a unique digital Infrastructure to solve India’s hard problems towards presence-less, paperless, and cashless service delivery.

“We believe Open Banking represents the next “UPI moment,” opening up new capabilities empowered by data,” TCS’ Report suggests. The strategic imperative for banks will be to figure out the implications stemming from the widespread consent-driven sharing of financial information.

From an operational perspective, banks will need to invest in technology for evaluating and acting upon large volumes of diverse data.

Despite the anticipated marketplace shifts, banks are well positioned to deliver solutions with deeper functionality, especially in areas such as corporate and SME banking, which requires deeper, contextual financial advice and expertise beyond what fintechs, telecom companies, and technology firms can typically provide. In these specialist segments, banks will likely continue to thrive.

HSBC’s Open Banking APIs and ICICI’s API banking are two successful examples of open banking. While HSBC’s open banking APIs enable third parties to begin integrating their financial services into merchant’s applications, ICICI’s payment APIs enable the complete payment lifecycle from registration to making transactions, checking status, and de-registering.

The Road Ahead

There are different ways in which financial services companies can approach the adoption of API banking or open banking. One way is to build APIs in-house, or they can also buy APIs and then bring them in-house. The second way is to integrate with platforms and partners like Valuebound.

A collaborative model can help banks future-proof their technological pursuits, given that it is still hard to say where the banking industry will go in a decade or half from here. By engaging with platforms and partners, FIs get an opportunity to position themselves for growth in real-time data exchange, embedded banking, and real-time payments.

Partnering with a product engineering company reduces a traditional organization’s time to market by adopting an agile product development and deployment. If you wish to spin off a successful, agile, cost-effective digital operation, get in touch with us to learn how we can accelerate your business model towards API banking or open banking.

In the next insight of our three-part series, we shall talk about the key tenets of open banking that form the pillars of a successful open banking ecosystem and a market-ready strategy for implementing an open banking business model by solving the challenges mentioned in this insight.

Financial data Application programming interfaces or APIs are one of the emerging innovation triggers of the banking and financial services industry as per the Gartner Hype Cycle for Digital Banking Transformation, 2022. APIs help financial institutions (FI) create products that can meet customer demand in the times of fintech penetration into the mainstream. API-based open banking is a mechanism wherein traditional retail banks open their application programming interfaces for third parties to create new apps or services.

The percentage of banks and credit unions that have invested in developing APIs has grown from 35% in 2019 to 47% in 2021, says PYMNTS data.

Open banking using APIs is a way for incumbent financial institutions and banks to partner with fintech rather than holding a competition with them. In this first part of our three-part series of API-based open banking insights, we shall holistically discuss-

• What is Open Banking or API Banking?
• How do banking APIs work
• Why incumbent financial institutions must move from the status quo?

CMOs, CIOs, and C-Suite executives of financial services companies and retail banks can gain usable insights from this series of open banking to build an API-enabled digitally advanced product or service platform.

What is Open Banking or API Banking?

Open Banking or API-based Banking is defined as APIs (XML/JSON codes) for allowing bank and client servers to communicate securely with one another. API banking makes data transfer between these entities seamless and ensures secured integration between the bank and customer’s systems. This capability of APIs enables customers to carry out their banking transactions without toggling between their Enterprise Resource Planning or ERP platform, and the bank.

How do Banking APIs Work?

Non-banking companies are developing and facilitating a range of core financial services to clients by connecting with APIs of financial services companies, FIs, and retail banks. This has led to the emergence of platforms connecting clients with bank APIs. These platforms pitch themselves as banking-as-a-service (‘BaaS’) or middleware.

At the back end, an intermediate layer connects with banks and regulated entities. On the front end, it hosts various fintech companies and non-bank entities (Fig. 1). So, the API platforms act as the infrastructure. In contrast, non-banking enterprises and fintech companies integrate financial and banking services in their non-financial offerings.

Why Move From the Status Quo?

According to Accenture, 29% of banks’ traditional retail products-based revenue streams are at risk. Most bankers expect a 10% increase in overall organic banking growth. While, in 2020 alone, there was a 55% boost to banking revenue from new opportunities created by open API-enabled services.

The adoption of open banking or API banking has gained traction over the last decade across the globe. There has been a significant difference in its interpretation, reception, and adoption from one country to another. Yet, if we mainly speak about market readiness in India, there has been a significant surge in the FinTech space.

Pertaining to the competitive landscape, financial institutions have taken active steps to educate the customer, invested in increasing distribution, and offered rewards to drive customer behavior. Account aggregation use cases are expected to scale up.

Key Takeaway

Whether the banking industry also continues to thrive in the retail financial services segment will depend entirely on how well they navigate the next few years along with open banking. The success stories will be those that can stand the ground with flexibility and imagination to create offerings by meticulous use of APIs and bringing together multiple domains, within and outside of financial services. To explore the growth potential, C-suite executives must also be aware of the global open banking situation. In the next part of this series, we explain the challenges and opportunities of adopting an open banking business model.

In the first part of this two-series insights, we looked at why retail banks must ride the Banking as a Platform or BaaP wave to create revenue streams, enhance customer satisfaction, and build partnerships with fintech companies to walk toward new-age automation in finance.

McKinsey reasonably points out that “Banks are better served to get ahead of and define the trend rather than waging a futile battle to repel it.” Given that many CMOs, CIOs, and C-Suite Executives are interested to upend the status quo and explore possibilities that move past their set patterns of vertically integrated, closed-loop offerings, this blog will offer insights into a strategic roadmap for retail banks to compete in a platform world (Fig. 1)

Adopt API-Powered Platform Strategy

After a retail bank has demonstrated its maturity at the level of emerging or the intentional emergence stage on delivering a product set that involves APIs, it can go on to a more specific level for leveraging and monetizing APIs.

In order to adopt an API-fuelled platform strategy, banks must be ready to face organizational and technical challenges. At the organizational level, banks must bring a change in functional mindset through multidisciplinary team creation, redesigning customer expectation strategies, and reshaping business architecture. At the technology level, banks must pursue process automation, experimentation with rapid prototyping, updating development approaches, and maintaining APIs at the internal level.

Generate Platform Exclusivity

More than 50% of the banking executives in the World Retail Banking Report said that the critical challenges to maintaining brand exclusivity are- the multi-home nature of platforms, and the ability of partners to participate in multiple ecosystems. The survey also suggests that nearly three-quarters of the executives are worried about brand dilution in such an ecosystem.

Therefore to understand how banks can build and maintain exclusivity, they are also looking toward those industries which are taking the platform path. For instance, Amazon boosts homing costs by charging third-party sellers higher fees for orders not placed on the retailer’s marketplace. One way in which Banking as a Platform or BAAP can gain exclusivity is if they lock Fintech company or software development company in the strategic investment ecosystem.

Confront Brand Dilution

CMOs and CIOs, they can create strategies that are separate from core bank offerings. This way, they can ensure that their exclusive offerings get top billing and that the brand does not get diluted. An example in India is the digital application platform of HDFC Bank which provides loans against securities- mutual funds. It meshes an exclusive offering of loans into its exclusive digital application platform.

Avoid Product Cannibalization

Cannibalization is a chief concern of several bank executives, the survey in the World Retail Banking Report explains. Competition with fintech companies is a direct result of the digitization of financial services. But, one strategic way to avoid cannibalization could be to ensure that the partner products do not sit in direct competition with the bank’s product offerings. This will prevent the fintech companies from eating into the bank’s core business. Another method could be to avoid cannibalization, bank CMOs must work to ensure that they don’t invite third-party vendors with direct competition into their own ecosystem.

Meet Customers’ Lifestyle Needs

When banks seek to differentiate their Banking as a Platform or BAAP and build intense customer journeys through platform banking, they can mesh traditional offerings with lifestyle products that are non-financial in nature. Targeting lifestyle solutions that can drive customer engagement without jeopardizing bank offerings to a lower position in the chain can be a way to hit equilibrium.

For example, CaixaBank, a Spanish multinational financial services company, offers non-financial services like educational content, shopping, games, music, and video through its lifestyle banking platform while complementing its core financial offerings. After one year of launching its lifestyle banking platform, the mobile-only digital bank got hold of 3.1 million customers.

In this context, Zac Maufe from Google Cloud says, “embedded finance will be critical within the futuristic banking equation, where financial institutions are available whenever customers require financial services.”

Prevent Platform Leakage

Banking platform ecosystem can increase its value for customers and partners through cobranding arrangements and preferred pricing to ensure that there is no erosion in the banking ecosystem. To avoid third-party partners circumventing their banking platform and engaging directly with the bank’s customer base, CMOs can also offer support services to third parties. So this means that what begins with the banking platform must also stay there.

One example of preventing platform leakage can come from another industry, for instance, India’s travel and accommodation agency, OYO. They prevent customer leakage from its ecosystem by supporting partner hotels with advertising, financing, and brand management.

Measuring the Success of a Banking Platform

Banking as a Platform is a wave that’s still rising, and to which incumbent banks are not yet accustomed. The platform world operates in a different mindset than what retail banks are used to. So what is the right way to measure the success of a banking platform? “The accurate measure of an ecosystem will be the net impact of a consumer on the parent and associated entities,” said Raghuram Iyengar and David Reibstein, professors of marketing at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School.

Effective metrics include network effects, customer acquisition rate, the effectiveness of engagement in the market, and asking internal questions like how diverse the platform is in their offerings and partnerships.

“The ripple effect of a single customer journey will be throughout the ecosystem. It can help derive the value that a particular customer brings in and the value that the customer can get driving engagement and network effects,” add Raghuram Iyengar and David Reibstein.

Future of Banking as a Platform as We See It

The nature of Banking as a Platform or BAAP is to grow gradually through an ecosystem of complimentary offerings through services and solutions. Hence, cross-platform offerings or hybrid business models such as Amazon pay-Icici Bank partnerships make way for the business.

If you’re interested in embedded banking into the platform and are looking to partner with a digital experience company, learn how Valuebound can assist you in carving a successful BAAP journey.