Finastra Looking to Partner with Fintechs for Marketplace Platform

Finastra is looking for more potential partners working on regulatory technology, risk management, and predictive analytics for its cloud-based marketplace platform FusionFabric.cloud.

Pedro Porfirio, global head of treasury and capital markets at the company, tells WatersTechnology the company is actively looking for financial technology partners to help expand the platform.

“We’re looking to partner with fintechs that have real value and use cases. We have a number of fintechs we are working with, and we would like to extend that invitation to others. We want you to bring your proofs of concept to us,” Porfirio says.

He says the company is interested in “old world” solutions, such as regtech solutions aimed at capital markets risk. “And then we want to see the new world, how we can help predict for clients.” 

He adds that the company “doesn’t have a lot of fintechs yet, but we are working on it.”

Porfirio says Finastra is currently working with three firms in regtech, risk management, and data mining to bring their services to the FusionFabric.cloud platform. The firms are Delta Connect, Vector Risk and Clarus FT.

FusionFabric.cloud is Finastra’s cloud-based applications market place that is built on Microsoft Azure and is aimed at bringing products to market faster. The platform hosts Finastra’s applications, and is also open to outside developers. Launched in 2018, it currently has 17 applications, 10 of which are live and the remaining seven still in production.

App markets have proliferated in the past couple of years as the move from monolithic applications to a more modular, microservices architecture has grown. The “API economy” has seen a boom in companies offering their applications via API and the establishment of app marketplaces where clients can choose which services to download into their systems. WatersTechnology previously reported that an IBM report quotes estimates that one million APIs will be in use before the end of this decade, compared to 20,000 at the end of 2015. Halfway through this year, the API directory Programmable Web says APIs registered on its site passed the 22,000 mark, after a 30% increase in registered APIs over the last four years.

Porfirio says Finastra will work with the partners for their proofs of concept before moving the applications into the platform. Part of the vision of FusionFabric.cloud is to serve as a development sandbox for financial applications.

“First, we’re looking at the functionality of it. And what I’ve tried to do is share it with users to understand what the fintech does. Then the next step is to actually build the technology or get this technology bridge to [the platform],” Porfirio says. “Depending on the use case, they can use APIs or a data lake. Then we ask the fintech to undergo a certification with a third party for security testing and penetration testing before it goes into the app store.”