Experience. A buzzword that means everything and nothing. A way to express almost every single feature and application on the market. But what if you would wrap an entire product around this word? And maybe actually deliver value to the market? 

The origin story – who built the company and what does it do?

The company was founded by Fiona Roach Canning, Alastair Lukies, Jonathan Hughes, and Tim Joslyn. Since then, Fiona RoachCanning has been the CEO.

Pollinate is a product that offers an Experience-as-a-Service (EaaS). It targets banks and merchants that want to have integrated front-end solutions quickly and at a low cost. Pollinate gives companies the ability to use a configuration toolkit alongside the integration, configuration, and operating services.

With the company’s Component Library, you can build mini-apps tailored to accomplish specific tasks. You can integrate, configure, and run services matching your third-party vendors.

These are all pre-build, so naturally there is still a limit to what you can do. They are tailored only to some extent, therefore custom software development is out of the question. You would still need someone to build on the foundation of what’s already there.

By linking merchants and banking institutions, Pollinate shortens the time-to-market, increases margins, and enables payment processors to enhance their direct and indirect offerings to partners.  Pollinate enables processors to offer an integrated experience for their clients – providing capabilities to brand and embed payments into their channels, giving banks more control over merchant relationships.

Banking-as-a-Service, Platform-as-a-Service, and sector-centric strategies all have a place within the bank of the future. They create clear value for banks by doubling down on their unique skillsets and market access. For boardrooms, the key decision is identifying where they can win and with whom they need to collaborate to secure profitable growth for the next decade and beyond.

According to Pollinate, there are three scenarios for banking in the future:

  • Banking-as-a-Service (BaaS)
  • Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS)
  • Payments-as-a-Service

All three with their unique challenges. 

The first one is essential but invisible. It has growth opportunities like:

  • POS financing, including Buy Now, Pay Later
  • SMB lending
  • Corporate lending
  • Deposit accounts and payment services, such as cards

Banks already have the established infrastructure and products to address the needs of business customers, but fintechs have the data-rich experience layer that customers have come to expect. Through partnerships and adapting products for Banking-as-a-Service, there is more opportunity to power customer experiences at scale.

The second one is open but owned. This approach establishes the bank at the center of an ecosystem of services and suppliers, which engage with customers through its platform. The bank’s services to its end-users are enhanced by a curated list of external suppliers that plug into this platform. 

As a digital platform, the roles and responsibilities of the bank change. As a trusted provider of services to a network of suppliers, factors such as downtime and security are key. 

Furthermore, to ensure customers value the platform and remain loyal, there can be no gaps in service offerings, while any change in approved providers will need managing to reduce any disruption to customers.

The third one targets specialists to assure loyalty. On a broader basis, banks have an opportunity to focus on their reputation as a haven in a changing world for customers. For example, the importance of security to an SMB cannot be underestimated, with 60% of SMBs failing within 6 months of a cyber-attack. These are businesses that can’t risk operating with a financial services provider that doesn’t make security a priority, while they will value services that protect them from harm. Products can be marketed as both innovative and secure so that risk becomes a core design principle.

Pollinate tries to empower all players around the table to build the future together. Business customers increasingly expect banking to be a digital-first experience and banks need to deliver this if they are to remain competitive in an increasingly digital economy.

The business model and revenue streams

To compete and be profitable in this area, the banking sector is seeking platforms that use data to fuel useful commerce experiences for SMBs, providing them insights into how they can drive more revenue through their businesses. This is the thinking behind Pollinate Global, which was initially incubated within NatWest, one of the UK’s largest commercial and retail banks, and later spun out as an independent business. 

Pollinate is using Confluent Cloud, the Apache Kafka platform that uses streaming data to provide real-time insights to organizations, to build out these experiences for merchants, as well as provide additional insights to the banks themselves. 

Summary

The fintech business and its widely understood ecosystem are going through rapid changes. Today the key is exactly that: ecosystem. At Code & Pepper, we believe that it’s a good idea to keep tabs on what’s happening.

That’s why we decided to smooth the development stream. We bet on artificial intelligence (AI) to speed up and enhance the process. We hire the top 1.6% of software engineers on the market to deliver value. This is where it got us; please look at our case studies section. Your next project can be there too.