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Use casesData for subscriptions podcast - Episode #10
The Fintech Industry’s Data Challenges
Guest
Thomas Walker
Senior Solution Consultant
Guest
Thomas Walker
Senior Solution Consultant
Episode description
Although the fintech industry is rapidly growing, fintech companies often struggle with timely billing and quickly being able to offer new services. In this episode, we look at how fintech SaaS companies are overcoming these challenges with automated usage data processing.
We speak with Thomas Walker, Senior Solution Consultant at DigitalRoute, who works closely with fintech companies as they modernize their data management for faster billing and flexible pricing.
Highlights
One trend we’ve seen in the fintech industry is that there are more companies offering SaaS for different kinds of reporting, such as risk management, identification, and analytics involving machine learning. Another fintech industry trend is an increasing focus on data management. In a recent Forbes Insights report, 83% of executives say that improving data management is going to help their company improve customer services and increase their bottom line. There is a lot of activity and opportunities in the fintech industry now around where these two trends meet, of offering SaaS and improving data management.
As a solution consultant at DigitalRoute, I work with fintech companies that are looking to improve their billing, customer services, and pricing models – and data management plays a key role in all these areas. One company we are working with has a financial reporting SaaS portfolio and customers that have complex requirements. Some of their customers are banks and financial institutions, and some are large enterprises with global operations. What this company does is bring all their asset information together in one place so they can offer reporting and analytics to customers. When we started working with them, they had a plan to use different levels of pricing as a way to gain more customers and increase the value they provide to customers.
To offer their fintech services to customers, they had a huge mix of systems. Some of their systems were 15 years old, and some of them they weren’t even sure what they did, but they knew they couldn’t stop them. These operational problems made it difficult to onboard new customers and get billing out in time. There was a lot of effort involved in actually doing the billing, including using Excel to feed the billing system.
They wanted to take a step back and see if they could make their pricing and billing more streamlined and less time consuming while using less resources. They wanted to make it easier to onboard new customers and make their monthly billing process run more smoothly. If they could automate some of these processes, they could redeploy resources to other revenue-generating positions in the company.
A couple of years ago they started with a new billing system, which they thought could handle all of these challenges. When that system failed, they realized that they had to find a solution not only for billing, but usage mediation and usage data processing. That’s where DigitalRoute came in, helping them solve the usage data management piece of the puzzle.
Some companies try to solve usage processing with ETL or iPaaS tools, but those will only take you so far. These tools can load data, but when you need to take the usage data and apply complex pricing for every customer based on specific rules, these tools can’t handle it. Other companies try to solve usage data processing with solutions custom built by system integrators. These solutions can work great for what they are designed to do, but when business models change it can be very costly and time consuming to adapt them to new requirements.
We wanted to create a use case that showed all of our expertise and capabilities for the fintech industry. WealthCanyon is an institutional investment, accounting and reporting SaaS company. They provide a reporting platform for banks, brokerage houses, large multinational companies, and fund managers.
Similar to the fintech SaaS company I talked about earlier, they had a problem with timely billing, and they also wanted to be able to slice and dice their services to provide more customer value. The back end of this is that they needed much more data granularity about service usage data. DigitalRoute’s software is able to capture and process all of the data about how customers use their services, and it easily integrates with other business systems for billing, CRM and ERP. This helps WealthCanyon streamline billing and enables them to quickly offer flexible pricing models for each customer.
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