The name Backbase already gives away a bit of where the company positions itself. At the back of the whole, out of the view of consumers but at the same time completely in the foreground. Many of the services with which bank customers can easily do the work themselves nowadays are largely the work of Backbase.
Well-known and lesser-known names
Around 120 financial institutions worldwide use the services of Backbase. This includes some of the world's largest and best-known parties such as BNP Paribas, Goldman Sachs, Deutsche Bank and ABN AMRO from the Netherlands. Incidentally, they are not just well-known names, the customer base also includes parties such as the Capital Bank of Jordan and the National Bank of Iraq.
Backbase's slogan is 'We help financials become loved by their customers'. In this day and age, that comes down to offering excellent digital accessibility. “In short, the business model comes down to selling licenses,” says Leonore van Waaij, Backbase's CFO. "We do this as multi-year contracts to our customers. With this we build a customer portfolio in which there is more and more value for many years and that also gives us the opportunity to use all those funds for our further growth."
Van Waaij explains that Backbase is a real software company. The company's core activities therefore relate to everything related to research and development. “More than half of our people are working on this. We do that to a large extent here, from Amsterdam. But there is also a large development center in Cardiff. And we use near shoring partners in Eastern Europe. All those teams work agile. So we have small squads where each team is working on some functionality or technology.”
Get more - digital transformation for banking
What Backbase actually does is create a platform with which Backbase's customers – the banks – can again serve their own customers digitally as well as possible. A kind of droste effect. That platform acts as a kind of blanket over the core systems of the banks, making it possible to serve customers through all channels of the banks throughout the life cycle, from opening a bank account to closing financial products. .
Platform hangs over core systems
Host Jeroen Broekema asks van Waaij whether it is complicated to use such a platform in combination with the bank's IT systems, ranging from old to new. “In principle, IT is a solution to complex problems. With our platform you can therefore go over all those different core systems – because a bank usually has not one but a whole range of them – to build integrations on the front-end side, i.e. what the customer sees. there is one and the same experience for the customer. So yes, it is complex, but our platform actually simplifies that for our customer, the bank.”
After an implementation, Backbase remains involved in the operation. The product that Backbase supplies is a standard product, but with the option of applying 'enhancements'. “Of course, every customer has its own house style, certain functionalities that they find very important in their own distinctive character. We can help them with the implementation, we can also train the people. Many large banks also have System Integrators in their package of service providers and we help them too.”
“We try to be there during that entire period so that ultimately the customer wants to stay with us for the longer term, because such an investment is a very large budget, also for a bank. Throughout the entire lifecycle, we have a Customer Success team that serves the customer in the best possible way.”
Digitization has now been so generalized that you can hardly call it a trend anymore, rather commonplace. Within this development of digitization, however, there are sub-streams that are currently receiving extra attention from banks. “Everything is mobile-first right now. So is our product. Of course you see that the web is still necessary, but the mobile applications are leading. In addition, we also provide digital sales, which are all kinds of traditional processes that used to be done via a form, but which you now want to digitize. Of course, all banks are also looking at convenience for the customer on the one hand, but also optimizing their own costs.”
Want to start your own bank?
It is now customary in the episodes of Leaders in Finance that Broekema presents his guest with a teaser - and also a pleaser - at the end of the episode. In this case, the teaser comes from Broekema himself. Would it be an idea for Backbase to set up a small bank itself? Not to get in the way of our own customers, but simply to understand how banking customers think.
“Nice question! We have a mission to get 10% of the world population on a Backbase-powered app and we do that through our customers, the banks. We do have mechanisms in place to collect a lot of feedback from our current customers, so that we can ultimately innovate better.”
This information is collected on the one hand via the sales side, in which banks indicate what their needs are. On the other hand, a lot of data comes in from the implementation side. In addition, there are also research and consultancy firms that regularly publish about what is 'hot' and what is 'not'. “I think the feedback we get there is relevant enough for us to continue to innovate our product. In addition, I think that we also help the smaller banks that do not have that knowledge themselves by showing what is possible on a wider range. So I don't think we need to play the role ourselves to be able to improve on that”, concludes Van Waaij.
