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CW Innovation Awards: How WLTH is disrupting traditional banking
The fintech company built its own technology stack that delivers data analytics and other capabilities as it seeks to win market share from traditional banks
For years now, traditional banks have dictated much of the financial value chain. But with growing dissatisfaction over poor customer service and the inability to innovate despite having large troves of customer data, nimbler fintech players have begun disrupting traditional financial services.
This is what Australia-based WLTH (pronounced “wealth”) is doing. The fintech player started in 2020 with a mission to build an entire technology stack that offers customers a view of the entire WLTH financial portfolio and deliver a concierge of financial services to customers.
To achieve this, WLTH began by building from scratch its Single Customer Portal (SCP, pronounced “skip”), which is aimed at utilising technology to make banking simple.
To do this, WLTH had to be a data-driven fintech by ensuring that its systems, connectivity and customer experience, including those related to back-office as well as customer-facing assets, are able to deliver this outcome in every manner.
The fintech had to create an environment capable of bringing on new products while incorporating other third-party suppliers over time and also accommodate international expansion.
SCP therefore had to include the ability to support geographically dispersed data repositories and application runtime environments in a secure, reliable and robust multicloud environment.
The result of these objectives allowed WLTH to deliver neo-banking services aimed at disrupting traditional banking solutions, such as commercial and residential lending, transactional accounts, digital payments via an app, and a loyalty platform for users.
In all, WLTH spent A$1m on the SCP. The project, which was named Financial Services Project of the Year at the Computer Weekly Innovation Awards APAC 2022, formally started in July 2021 with a three-stage plan that was completed by February 2022.
The SCP project combined the expertise of its in-house team, which comprised senior management, a programme manager, three IT specialists in digital, data and service management, and one business and customer experience analyst each.
“Winning this award is a positive reinforcement,” said Dave Chapman, chief technology officer at WLTH. “We’ve built a world-class and scalable product that isn’t built on a legacy foundation, allowing us to connect and pivot into the future as and when we see fit.”
More value to consumers
For WLTH customers, SCP has been able to provide access to one consolidated dashboard that offers a view of their entire WLTH financial product portfolio.
Customers are able to track all their assets and liabilities and monitor their overall net position. This includes business payments, business account management, personal accounts and loans, rewards programmes and card products.
WLTH believes this integrated experience saves time and reduces complications when dealing with customers’ financial lives.
The benefits also extend to WLTH staff, who have access to dashboards that show every product a customer owns and every interaction they have. This helps them to improve their ability to deliver a whole gamut of concierge and support experiences.
All involved
To ensure the SCP project was successful, a broad level of WLTH executives were deeply involved at all stages to speed up communication and collaboratively make decisions.
These include the chief technology officer, chief operations officer, chief product officer and chief risk officer. This team worked closely with the CEO at strategy meetings that were scheduled three times a week.
This ensured the whole executive team stayed informed and aligned, while any changes in direction could take place within 24 hours at most.
WLTH also created an enterprise architecture reference document with partners to define the principles for selection of services, tools and platforms. This facilitated selection, configuration and deployment of services across the board as quickly as possible.
“Planning was critical to complete the execution,” said Chapman. “Video meetings were challenging amid the pandemic, but when managed well in conjunction with the use of tools such as Slack and with full executive engagement, we ensured we kept the project heading in the right direction.”
On the future of WLTH, Chapman said: “The ecosystem we’ve created will allow us to bring the many products we have coming online to be integrated seamlessly and delivered. This will lead to the disruption we intended as we scale and expand our integrated product sets across the entire payments landscape.”
Read more about CW Innovation Awards APAC 2022
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