Netherlands-based Backbase has launched its Grand Central service and has invested USD 10 million to accelerate the connectivity of region-specific products. Following this announcement, the Grand Central is aimed to provide banks and financial institutions with the needed tools for their modernisation and digital processes.

In addition, the solution is set to optimise this landscape by delivering an industrialised integration Platform-as-a-Service (iPaaS) tool, which was developed to provide customers with unified APIs in order to improve banks’ channel applications, as well as third-party developers. In line with the Grand Central launch, Backbase made a USD 10 million investment fund, dedicated to the process of accelerating the connectivity of region-specific services and products. This will focus on empowering banks and financial institutions around the world to streamline their capabilities and operations, reduce costs, and provide an overall improved customer experience.

More information on the release By leveraging a BIAN-based domain model and unified banking APIs, the Grand Central service will connect any channel application to multiple downstream systems, such as customer relationship management systems, core banking platforms, payments systems, fintech systems, and more. Through the use of secure and industrialised plug-and-pay connectors, banks and financial institutions will be enabled to accelerate their time-to-market while also reducing the budget that is typically associated with integration. Grand Central aims to allow banks to gain the ability to control data across their tech stack, which will result in improved digital customer experiences across web and mobile applications that run on the Backbase Engagement Banking Platform.

Grand Central will also provide users with a universal integration that will connect fragmented productised ISV services and technologies, aiming to enable improved communication between parties. In addition, the product will offer reduced complexity which streamlines the complex technology landscape most banks rely on, leading to cost savings and optimised operational efficiency.  Backbase’s recent partnerships and developments Netherlands-based engagement banking company Backbase announced multiple collaborations and launches in the last couple of months, covering several different geographic areas around the world. In September 2023, the company teamed up with the identity verification and fraud prevention platform FrankieOne in order to simplify the onboarding process for financial institutions in Australia and New Zealand.

Throughout this partnership, banks and credit unions in the regions (ANZ) were given the possibility to onboard clients and members in a secure and efficient manner, by combining Backbase’s personalised banking experience platform with the robust identity verification services of FrankieOne. Furthermore, Backbase’s Engagement Banking Platform was enabled to access a suite of Know Your Customer (KYC), biometric verification, transaction monitoring, anti-money laundering (AML), compliance, and fraud detection capabilities from a curated selection of local and international companies and providers. Earlier in the same month, Australia-based neobank Judo Bank announced its collaboration with Backbase in order to develop new digital experiences for small and medium-sized enterprise (SME) business banking and term deposit customers.

Judo Bank was set to leverage Backbase’s Engagement Banking Platform (EBP) for designing new digital experiences for SMEs, as well as to improve its overall relationship with bankers. The financial institution aimed to offer more time and resources to their users and clients, while also giving them the possibility to access monthly releases of additional products and features in the future. .