Allevo is one of the actors that plays on the financial services stage. Allevo provides software solutions that help banks, SMEs, corporate treasuries, microfinance and public administration automate financial flows, connect heterogeneous systems and achieve compliance.
THE FINANCIAL INDUSTRY ON THE LOOKOUT FOR:
- In Europe: PSD2 and data privacy compliance
- Building an open banking business model
- Instant Payments service
- Safeguarding systems and protection against cyber attacks
- Flow automation and interoperability
Allevo works in close partnership with customers to identify pains and needs, moving from generic pain points, as the ones listed above, to the context of their business. Allevo’s experts then architect software solutions that help solve these issues, guided by good design principles.
The business model followed by Allevo is an open one, relying on open source technologies, which enable the customer to lower TCO, own source code that is auditable, increase security and benefit from more frequent software updates.
This open model has been chosen to set the base for creating software components that can talk with one another. Mistakes of building closed software of the past are widespread today in various industries, not just financial services. Undocumented black boxes have been built and are still running in the production environment of many entities, causing both lack of interoperability and security breaches. This makes it difficult to add functionality, to scale or to secure these components, which are an open door for restless hackers.
In Europe, steps have been taken at a higher level to regulate communication between banks and other financial services providers. This resulted in PSD2, which sets the rules for how this communication happens via open APIs. The benefit is that these requirements set the base for capitalizing on top of this rudimentary infrastructure by building an open banking business model that can bring new revenue streams and offer new financial services, more aligned to software capabilities of the present. How many millennials know what a promissory note or a cheque is, let alone how it can be used? However, most can easily understand and make use of a mobile payment between friends, not to mention more advanced means of payments.
We at Allevo have designed a software solution, FinTP-Connect, that enables banks to become compliant to provisions of PSD2 and GDPR (in relation to the processed payment data). This solution goes however beyond PSD2 and opens doors for banks to pursue the bank as a marketplace model and offer new services to both individual and business customers, using open infrastructure.
Built-in PSD2 Compliance through FinTP-Connect
FinTP-Connect is a PSD2 compliance solution that offers centralized management of requests initiated by PISP or AISP on behalf of the final customer. It retrieves and processes these requests, transfers them to the Core Banking system, and then returns the responses back to the PISP/AISP.
FinTP-Connect receives requests from the PISP or AISP in JSON or XML formats, or as ISO 20022 elements, and transmits them to the Core Banking system in its native format. FinTP-Connect also retrieves responses from the Core Banking system and sends them to the PISP or AISP as JSON or XML or ISO 20022 elements.
MAIN FEATURES
- API management
- TPP identification and validation for access to services
- Rules management for applying Strong Customer Authentication
- User activity tracking: TPP Management and Fraud Risk Management
- Log of services run by users: TPP Management
- Native format configuration: requests from the TPP, responses from Core Banking systems
OPERATIONAL FEATURES
- Access token validation
- Business rules validation
- Fraud detection
- Format conversion
- Content or rules-based routing
- Technical service aggregation
- Strong Customer Authentication business logic
COMPONENTS
- API Integration & Services
– Management of services run by users through the TPP
– Entry format configuration
– Request delivery from the API Gateway to the Core banking systems
– Retrieval of account information or answers for initiated payment instruction
- Monitoring and Reporting Activity Tool
– Activity monitoring through API Gateway
– Reporting capability to identify and manage fraud risk
– Client and TPP service access statistics
FLOWS / APIs
- TPP identification
- Client authentication
- Consent acquirement
- Payment initiation
- Account info
– Transaction history
– Balance
Going Beyond PSD2
Apart from plain compliance to PSD2 provisions, banks should also be looking to build several functionalities on top of the open architecture, capitalizing on the data exchange mechanisms put in place.
A bank can authorize itself as PISP or AISP, offering individuals a better overview of their financial state and spending habits, as well as personalized products for goal driven savings, loans or other banking products.
Banks can then partner with merchants and bring the merchant ecosystem closer to its customer, by intermediating needs of customers with merchant offers.
As far as business customers are concerned, it is a known fact that SMEs face a high number of issues which include: late payments from their own customers, lack of easy or automated financing to support ongoing business, as well as the need to manage their own accounting and financials. What banks can do in this matter is to step in and offer services tailored for these SMEs, providing financial aggregation, factoring, accounting or ERP services, using the same infrastructure they use in relation to individual customers.
All these options enable a bank to process more data and to reinforce their position as trust entities, able to manage financial, as well as personal data for people and businesses. This allows banks to pursue the bank as a data vault and identity provider model, which is a first step in bringing requirements of GDPR and PSD2 together and servicing the best interest of customers.
It gives people and businesses the possibility of managing data from one single point and it allows them to share less data with merchants and entities that face a far lower level of regulation than banks and who thus introduce a far higher risk of breach or fraud.
For all these to happen, infrastructure must be designed in such a way to support this level of protecting and presenting data insights to its customer.
About Us
Allevo is a Romanian company that uses agile methods in the software development lifecycle process, leveraging a long lasting customer intimacy relationship and easing access to newest technologies.
Our solutions are built to process financial transactions, automate flows and offer compliance to regulatory and industry standards.
Allevo services are executed by a team of experts with deep understanding and technical expertise, certified by software providers such as IBM, Microsoft, Oracle, SWIFT.
For more information on how Allevo can help solve cross-cutting issues and enable your institution to explore new opportunities:
Contact Us
Ioana Guiman (Managing Partner, Business Development)
ioana.guiman@allevo.ro
www.allevo.ro