Westpac has announced that it is to take on fintech FrankieOne as their identity infrastructure provider for their new business-as-a-service (BaaS) platform.
The Big Four bank aims to offer authorisation to businesses that lack a banking license to provide banking services, with FrankieOne taking on the role of creating and running Westpac’s Baas infrastructure. FrankieOne is dominant in Australia’s BaaS sector, with 100% market share, including three of the Big Four banks.
The move was announced at the 7th annual Fintech Summit, with FrankieOne’s CEO Simon Costello and Westpac’s General Manager Corporate & Business Development, Macgregor Duncan presenting a talk together.
Duncan explained how banks were looking to change to a more open architecture, which would allow the banks to create a stronger customer outcome by allowing a fintech such as FrankieOne to take over customer onboarding.
Costello added that FrankieOne’s cloud-based infrastructure would help a huge company like Westpac to streamline their customer onboarding processes.
“Historically banks have had to work with dozens of siloed software and data providers, few of which have the ability to “talk to” other systems,” he said. “This creates clunky, disjointed internal processes, poor customer experience, and ultimately, business intelligence is compromised.”
“Whereas, now Westpac has integrated into FrankieOne’s unified API they can ‘switch on’ new services for its customers, and access to over 170 different third-party vendors and data sources. This has enabled Westpac to supercharge its speed to market and remove the need for multiple vendor implementations.
“The move to partner with Westpac forms part of our core vision to saving business billions in IT costs and providing superior customer experiences.”
“As Australians continue to look for new and different ways to do their banking, we are excited to be part of the ever-growing BaaS movement with Westpac. Not only does BaaS help reduce the cost and time needed to launch banking services in Australia, but it will also accelerate efforts to innovate the fintech sector as a whole.”
