Has your company decided to offer a digital investment journey to your customers? Making that decision will help attract and retain customers to your franchise. The next step is selecting a technology partner that can deliver on your business priorities and your IT requirements. Everyone is under pressure to “do more with less” and informed decision-making can help you achieve business, budget and IT goals. Let’s look at how important modularity and ease-of-use are in evaluating your technology options.
Modularity: Choice and Flexibility
When we created OutRank, we designed it to give clients a range of choices in how they could implement our solution within their existing strategic plan. Some companies need a solution for the entire customer journey. However, others have a technology operating system that can provide 80% of what is needed to deliver a digital experience, so rather than a complete platform, you just need a component or building block to insert into your tech stack to create a complete customer journey.
OutRank can be installed as a complete end-to-end financial analytics solution or it can be disaggregated into its constituent parts. For example, if you had everything necessary for an investment journey, with the exception of the ability to calculate economic scenarios, you could plug the OutRank ESG – Economic Scenario Generator - into your technology infrastructure.
You might be concerned that by unbundling the OutRank API, you are not benefitting from the power of the whole application. Rest assured in the knowledge that each component of our technology is as robust, reliable and resilient as the whole product. Because we are cloud-native, each element of our API can perform at high speed, is scalable and adaptable. Leveraging cloud technology helps OutRank, Kidbrooke’s financial simulation engine, to deliver at least 10x performance compared to competitive offerings. It is built to scale well across different workloads, which is essential for a seamless performance in the context of large organisations serving many end-customers.
Ease of Use: Integration and Implementation
Building a bespoke interface between an API and your tech stack can be time-consuming, costly and cumbersome. With a cloud-native provider, you can avoid these risks and integrate an API into your infrastructure with minimum effort.
We provide OutRank as a back-end API to simplify the integration processes as much as possible.
RESTful APIs conform to the design principles of the representational state transfer architectural style, or REST. When a RESTful API is called, the server will transfer a representation of the requested resource’s state to the client’s system. OutRank’s inputs are gathered and returned in JSON format, which conforms to the Open API 3.0 standard. Kidbrooke has designed OutRank for zero-planned maintenance, with world class security and reliability. Clients can have confidence that their privacy related compliance concerns are managed properly as OutRank is completely stateless when it comes to end-customer data. Data resides at the client.
Ease of Use: Speed
When time-to-market is of the essence you need an API that is easy to integrate across systems and use cases due to lightweight and well-defined end-points. You can start small, with a tightly defined project, demonstrate success and then move on to a larger project incrementally. It’s under your control.
If you are under pressure to deliver a new functionality but are concerned with disrupting your core operating system, it’s advisable to find a flexible technology partner than can support a phased development and launch. Therefore, the New Product Approval Process (NPAP) time can be reduced, and stakeholder needs can be addressed.
With OutRank, we support a gradual and cost-efficient build-out of new applications and use-cases over time without breaking existing code on the customer side. You can develop new functionalities safely, without the risk of slowing down your core operating architecture.
Implementation of our OutRank API can take from a few days for a smaller project, to just months for a large multinational. Digital transformation is a challenging task in general, but its core technical part can be easy given that the right vision is in place.
The way forward
Once you have integrated the relevant functionalities of OutRank with your systems, will you be future-ready? No one has a crystal ball to predict the future; however, you can ensure that your technology choices enable flexibility. The good news is that OutRank is intentionally transparent by design. Rather than be stymied by a black box, you will have visibility over the assumptions and business rules that were used in the development of the API since its inception. This makes internal adoption fast and future development possible.
With OutRank, you can be sure that the API will support any use case you want to build in the future, giving you true strategic freedom to innovate and be future-proof. These use cases include pension planning, investment advice and guidance, credit, mortgages and insurance journeys as well as considering domicile tax situations of your choice. Uniquely, these journeys can be considered together. That means that OutRank can guide the customer through the intricacies of their pension planning while also considering their mortgage situation and overall financial health.
Whatever the size of the project, we can help clients solve their challenges and improve their customer experience. At Kidbrooke, we believe our technology is fit for purpose and fit for the future.
If you’d like to learn more about OutRank, get in touch today.
