APAC Fintechs embrace open innovation with Finastra

Finastra welcomed several APAC Fintech early adopters to its FusionFabric.cloud open architecture ecosystem today at its regional flagship thought leadership event, Finastra Universe, in Singapore. 

by Microsoft Azure, Microsoft’s enterprise-ready trusted cloud platform, FusionFabric.cloud enables third parties to develop and deploy innovative apps. Organizations on board include InfoTrie, HedgeSPA and Paretix.

Hugh Cumming, CTO, Platforms, Finastra said, “The FusionFabric.cloud platform is gathering pace around the world, and we have Fintechs either based in APAC or supporting the region with innovative apps in development. Our goal is to change the way that financial services software is written, developed and deployed and these organizations are shining examples of our vision in practice.”

InfoTrie, a Singapore-based Fintech specialising in harnessing big data, is using the FusionFabric.cloud architecture to build an application for Fusion Invest. Users will be able to navigate between their portfolio and market sentiment analysis for specific assets, underpinned by InfoTrie data streams including Natural Language Processing, news and Twitter feeds.

Zhicheng Long, CTO at InfoTrie, said, “We are thrilled to be working with Finastra. The company’s open philosophy opens doors for us to develop and monetize apps quickly and in a modern technology environment. The FusionFabric.cloud architecture is incredibly easy to use and is proving more powerful compared to other platforms we’ve tried. We benefit from slick flow programming and a low code landscape, meaning we can develop at speed and save costs.”

A data partner of InfoTrie, with presence in Hong Kong, Singapore and Silicon Valley, HedgeSPA has just signed up to FusionFabric.cloud. The Fintech provides a proven core investment platform that can automate the entire investment cycle for institutional investors and has begun building front-end user interfaces (UI).

Dr. Bernard Lee, Founder and CEO at HedgeSPA said, “The FusionFabric.cloud environment holds huge potential for us. We are keen to develop Finastra-enabled UIs that can connect to our full functionality API, enabling users to access predictive investment analytics using artificial intelligence, big data, and cloud expertise. We expect the platform to make this easy – we only need complete the integration once and it will be available to Finastra’s wide sell-side customer base, enabling them to offer our front-to-back buy-side solution to their own clientele in a very cost-effective and hassle-free manner.”

Also benefitting the FusionFabric.cloud platform is Paretix, a start-up Fintech focused on emerging markets in APAC and Africa in the alternative credit scoring space. Based in Israel, the company aims to support the underbanked and is building an app to work in conjunction with the Fusion Essence core retail banking system.

Ariel Resnik, CEO at Paretix, said, “The tool we are developing will use our AI-based algorithm to assess credit risk and enable potential borrowers with limited credit history to access fair loans from financial institutions. We do this by combining their financial data, from Fusion Essence, with other data sources such as mobile information. The FusionFabric.cloud platform gives us the freedom to develop our app at speed. It also provides us the opportunity to reach Finastra’s retail banking customers, so we can empower them with a sophisticated dashboard that enables credit officers to view and understand the credit decision and the portfolio risk, and easily change their credit policy accordingly to view and explain credit scores to customers.”

Further afield, University College London (UCL) is gearing up for its overseas students, visiting London from China, to develop apps on the FusionFabric.cloud platform in Mandarin. Moreover, these students will graduate with expertise in banking, Fintech, computational finance, risk management, data analytics and machine learning. Their skills will dovetail well with Finastra’s bank customers in Asia.

Professor Donald Lawrence, Computational Finance Director at UCL said, “The FusionFabric.cloud architecture gives our students an amazing opportunity to develop with open APIs, to collaborate and drive innovative ideas. It also comes with the added incentive that the architecture allows them to monetize their creations for potential use by Finastra’s 9,000 strong financial services customer-base. These opportunities don’t come around often. Our relationship with Finastra (previously Misys) dates back to 2012 and we’re backing their approach as it will certainly open doors for our students from around the world.”