Interview | Ion Fratiloiu, Head of Commercial at Yobota

Ion Fratiloiu, Head of Commercial at Yobota shares his thoughts on the role Yobota are playing in the accelerated digital transformation and how Yobota are working with Fintechs to drive innovation. He also gives his explanation on the future relationship between fintechs and regulation.

You have recently entered the Banking as a Service space – can you tell us more about that?

Sure, so the way it works is that a BaaS client can get to market using an existing bank’s regulatory permissions and operations capabilities, all working on top of Yobota’s super flexible core banking platform. Clients can develop a proposition perfectly suited to their target customers & future plans, and apply their own bespoke customer experience on top, or use existing templates from our partner bank, Chetwood Financial. All this is supported through the native multibrand capabilities Yobota offers, along with our highly expressive APIs, without the hassle of creating and integrating an ecosystem from scratch.

We are going through an incredible period of accelerated digital transformation in payments – what is Yobota’s role in this change?

As payments are increasingly expected in real-time, we’re driving the market away from a batch processing approach. If you need to apply for a loan, why would you wait two days for funds to hit your account when another lender can get it to you now? Our facility to integrate directly into the payment rails via our partners allows our customers to keep up with demand and get cash to the customer in just a few minutes. While there are a lot of core banking providers out there in the market place, it’s the flexibility of our offering that makes us truly next-gen. Not only are we cloud-native by design, rather than just cloud compatible like many others, meaning we can support a much broader range of integrations and evolutions with ease; but we can also offer two distinct routes to market, while many others can only support one or the other. The first is that customers can use our pre-coded products either straight out of the box, or modified to fit their specific needs, while most companies don’t have the ability to flex a fixed offering. Alternatively, totally niche use cases that don’t fit the standard offerings can be coded directly on top of our APIs, making it incredibly easy to launch bespoke, innovative products, without a load of development work.

How are you working with FinTech’s to drive innovation at Yobota?

That’s an interesting question, with two distinct answers. One, we have existing partnerships with a range of amazing FinTech providers, allowing our clients to access their capabilities directly through our platform, without bespoke integrations. On the other side, we also work with innovative fintechs who have a cool idea for a product, or a clear vision of a customer problem to be solved. Our work with Fronted to enable rental deposit lending was based on our companies’ shared values around inclusion, accessibility, and creating products that can genuinely help customers do more with their money. Supporting emerging businesses to quickly and easily launch awesome products that help the customer and force legacy banks to do better, is a large part of our mission as a company.

In these times of accelerated transformation; how are you driving a culture of innovation?

We’re in a period of massive growth and are working tirelessly to make sure our company culture evolves with us, constantly ensuring we’re embedding good practices that will further the progress of the industry as a whole, and also allow our Yobotians to do the best work of their careers. Internally we have a super transparent culture that allows everyone an opportunity to run with ideas that will further our goals as a company; testing, learning and exploring the best things to progress our roadmap. Working with other influential players across the industry also allows us to keep up to date with the latest advancements, both business and technical, and make sure we’re truly offering the latest and greatest solutions to our clients.

What can you tell us about the Yobota platform?

Yobota is a cloud-native core banking platform built on open source technologies for maximum flexibility and scalability. Whatever your offering, be it fixed term, open ended, flexi saver, buy now pay later, SME lending, mortgages, car finance, or almost anything you can think of, our intelligent APIs let you build and deploy bespoke products, direct to the customer, without lengthy and costly development timeframes. Standard existi products can be market-ready in just six weeks, and when you build on the Yobota platform, you get five key things:

i. Standard and bespoke products - choose to work with existing products right out of the box, or create your own to target a super-specific niche

ii. Quote Distribution - we can work with your own platform or comparison sites, offering hundreds quotes a second and tracking the source to make commissions and partnerships a breeze.

iii. Staff app - a super simple interface that gives your team the freedom to support every customer, in record time.

iv. API toolkit - puts the power in your hands, with the ability to handle people, accounts, reference data, direct debits, loan restructuring and more, wherever you are in the world.

v. Reporting layer - provides you with everything you need to build your own customer insights and get the most from the numbers.

What do you think the future relationship between fintechs and regulation is?

The explosion of FinTechs has definitely shifted the industry significantly and will continue to do so. Not only is it forcing legacy banks to up their game and overhaul both their systems and product offerings in order to stay competitive in a market where customers are beginning to demand more, but it will also naturally change the face of regulation too. As we’ve seen with BNPL providers like Klarna, the regulator just wasn’t ready for them, and had to rush to catch up, and now with Banking as a Service meaning new providers don’t have to apply for their own licence, regulations are going to have to modernise to keep pace and support this awesome era of innovation which is doing exactly what the regulator wants, and giving the customer more options, and more transparency.

Outside London where do you see FinTech innovation coming from?

Obviously the US is a major player, with the World bank quoting ~21% growth in the industry year on year, and no one would be surprised to hear China mentioned either; but there are some significant European players too, with Switzerland capitalising on its financial reputation, and places like the Netherlands and Sweden specialising in payments tech, digital lending and neobanks. Really exciting is India, where investment in Fintech is just huge, and parts of Africa where we’re seeing a big rise in exciting companies looking to offer micro lending and similar initiatives that can genuinely help ordinary people do better.

Do you think Covid has driven innovation in FinTech?

Absolutely. The sudden shift to home working and the reduction in face to face financial services forced a lot of big players to suddenly rethink their strategies and get on board with fintechs, and digital transformation as a whole, in a big way. We actually commissioned a report to explore exactly this, and discovered that almost 80% of banks adopted a brand new technology they’d never used before as a result of covid, and around three quarters have embraced new technologies expressly to improve the customer experience and offer more personalised products. There’s some more info here: https://bit.ly/3w6HMBP