Making the most of a partnership

Oradian and Geniusto together offer world-class, flexible, and scaleable solutions for banks and non-bank financial institutions, focusing on opportunities for and the growth potential of institutions in emerging markets

Geniusto International is a Perth, Western Australia-based technology ‘enabler’ for banks and credit unions, payment providers, remittance companies, and eMoney issuers. Oradian, headquartered in Zagreb, Croatia, offers an extensible, cloud-native core banking solution optimised for financial institutions in emerging markets. The two groups have formed a partnership. IBS Intelligence asked Antonio Separovic [AS], Co-Founder & CEO, Oradian, and Matthew Edmunds [ME], Group CEO, Geniusto International, to explain the background of their partnership venture:

[AS] “Oradian provides the native-cloud core banking platform forming the architecture layer that underpins all our customer’s business operations, including accounting, loan management and products, with a suite of services fully enabling any mainstream lender or neobank providing financial services to its end-clients. From the very beginning, we designed our system with an accessible and simple API architecture layer to enable third parties, like Genuisto, to plug in and add functionality that further enhances our customers’ offerings to their end clients.”

[ME] “Geniusto and Oradian were initially brought together by our mutual customer Cantilan Bank in the Philippines. It was clear from the beginning that there is an excellent synergy between the two companies in terms of philosophy and approach to delivering world-class, flexible, and scalable solutions for banks and non-bank financial institutions. The two product sets nicely complement each other to provide a complete suite of tools for a financial institution to fully address the post-Covid digital landscape.”

What is the back story… how has each company evolved?

[AS] “As a provider of the core, we seek out the optimal partners that can enable enhanced functionality and widen the suite of services our customers offer their clients. Geniusto fits this perfectly. We needed a provider that could that integrate seamlessly to our core via APIs and a team we could work with to make the integrations simple while also taking the extra effort for our customers. Since partnering we’ve successfully deployed the joint solution with two large banks in the Philippines. The recent implementation of AgriBank is a testimony to the partnership, we have many more to follow.”

[ME] “The Geniusto technology was first established out of the UK in 2001. The suite of tools was fully focused from the beginning on the customer-facing challenges of ‘transactional banking’. The powerful Geniusto Payments Orchestration suite, paired with mobile and web apps, allows an institution to fully address the needs of both its retail and business customers with high security and deep capability around all types of payment services.”

What are the benefits of a cloud-native core banking system?

[AS] “Oradian is optimised for financial institutions in emerging markets looking for a flexible, adaptable approach to reaching more clients, scaling their business, and digitalising their processes, quickly. Our advanced, extensible banking system integrates seamlessly with our customers’ businesses via APIs to provide automated lending, risk management, scoring, accounting, compliance, messaging, reporting and more. Our core is extremely flexible, with the ability to meet our customers’ ever-evolving demands. This has been achieved by focusing on understanding our customer’s needs, their local lending and saving practices and ensuring our system can parametrise easily, with no coding required.

“Being on the cloud means these financial institutions can work more effectively and efficiently in the remote environments in which they operate. Being cloud-agnostic and built for extensibility means financial institutions can extend their banking and lending services through our core system to add a suite of services that  fit local regulatory requirements or meet changing customer expectations.”

Geniusto is described as a ‘technology enabler’ – what does that mean in practice?

[ME] “We take an agnostic approach to empowering the needs of an institution. At the heart of our solution is a powerful API integration hub tool that allows us to connect to unlimited systems and payment rails. We are happy for a bank to use some or all our modules and mix and match them with solutions from other providers, such as Oradian. Our goal is to ‘enable’ the customer with the best set of tools to address their specific challenges.”

How does a subscription-based service benefits clients?

[AS] “In the past, many financial institutions were excluded from the best technology due to large upfront costs, complicated lengthy contracts, and no business alignment. With the Oradian way, we grow and scale as our customers grow, ensuring our business interests are always aligned throughout our partnership. It can be seen as ‘pay as you grow’, and it enables access to cloud-native, extensible core banking technology, inclusive of the infrastructure and hosting, with no hidden costs.

“Included in the subscription fee is full support over the implementation phase, hosting, updates, data recovery and all the enablement to operate the software too. This keeps the pressure on us to ensure full implementation is delivered in the shortest possible time, the system is always online and our customers can focus 100% on their core business.”

[ME] “Geniusto’s ‘pay as you grow’ subscription-based licensing model provides a highly cost-effective approach for customers, providing considerable savings over time as their volumes grow. This OPEX model provides capital efficiency and predictability of costs for the institution.”

How does the use of APIs help?

[AS] “Oradian is designed API-first, so it can seamlessly integrate with third-party applications – offering full flexibility in architectural design and business needs – now and in the future. If a customer wants to continue using a third-party platform or adopt one that doesn’t even exist yet, Oradian supports them to connect. It’s all about ensuring customers can adapt their core banking system to their particular requirements.

 …there is an excellent synergy between the two companies in terms of philosophy and approach to delivering world class, flexible, and scalable solutions

“APIs are what has enabled the partnership with Genuisto. We work using REST APIs that are very well documented and connect with every part of the core system. This makes it simple for partners like Geniusto to hook in their technology layer and deliver a seamless service for our mutual customers.”

[ME] “At the heart of the Geniusto Suite is our API integration Hub tool [GO] Connect. This allows us to connect to a multitude of different systems and services using almost any messaging format. Where new services are needed, it is a fairly simple matter to update API capabilities with new parameters or data fields that ensure that changes can be executed rapidly, keeping costs and time to market down for customers.”

Does low code/no code give sufficient flexibility to the bank/financial institution?

[AS] “The low-code approach to development is all about usability out of the box. It makes it extremely simple to launch and configure new features and to respond to wants and disruptions without needing teams of developers with specific programming knowledge.

“We operate on the principle of ‘extensible banking’. Our users can adapt and configure their core banking system without coding knowledge and without waiting on our developers to deliver changes for them. They can do this, for instance, by using custom fields, that allow them to configure their own inputs when gathering data that are not included in the core banking system as standard. Extensibility allows businesses to innovate, adapt and differentiate themselves quickly without long development cycles and without additional cost from the supplier.”

[ME] “A low code approach to delivering applications provides considerable advantages for the customer. In many cases, business users can configure the solution to perform in the manner that they prefer without the need to engage expensive technical resources. In addition, they can configure and save new services and products in minutes rather than days or weeks. This offers cost efficiency and considerable savings for the institution. This is especially important for small banks who lack the size or operational budgets to pay for costly modifications.”

What markets are you focusing on and why?

[AS] “Oradian has grown from serving last-mile communities across Sub-Saharan Africa and Southeast Asia, and those continue to be the markets where demand for financial services will grow over the next two decades. Most of our customers are based in Nigeria and the Philippines, and we have been expanding outwards into other geographies such as Kenya, Vietnam, and India.

“These are exciting, dynamic, and diverse economies with the highest potential for FinTech growth. For instance, Vietnam has an unbanked population of 69%, but smartphone coverage of 67.8%, so there is a huge untapped market for innovative lenders and neobanks to deliver financial services to these underserved communities. What’s key is reducing barriers to entry for new players who want to move and grow fast, while also making the technology as accessible as possible for those looking to serve last-mile communities.”

[ME] “Initially, we are focusing on the Southeast Asian markets with two live projects in the Philippines and several more in the pipeline for 2023. Having now spent a year working together and learning about each other’s technologies, we are now building a tighter, joint, ‘Go to Market’ strategy for Southeast Asia and Africa. We will be jointly sponsoring a number of high-profile banking industry events and we are developing a joint product offering that will provide additional savings for customers by purchasing a ‘package offering’.”

How will your partnership develop?

[AS] “At present, we are working together to support our customers to accelerate their digitisation strategy and enable them to access the absolute best tech while lowering the barriers (and cost) for entry. The partnership with Genuisto is in its infancy but is already bearing fruit for Oradian customers. Both partners know there is much work to complete. We have only just begun delivering on the benefits of working together.

“We have two active implementations of Oradian’s banking system and Genusto’s mobile banking layer with large banks and lenders in the Philippines and from here, we are looking for ways to support our customers to further grow their reach with innovative, flexible and accessible cloud solutions.”

[ME] “There is a great synergy between the two organisations in terms of philosophy and approach. This is essential for the success of any partnership. By combining forces, we can leverage each other’s strengths and share both ideas and costs. In essence, the sum of the parts is greater than the whole. We will continue to work more closely together on joint marketing and sales operations, and we will continue to fine-tune our operational processes and technologies to lower the cost of implementation and accelerate ‘time to money’ for our customers.”