BankCloud: Could this platform be a game-changer in open banking?

Open banking has made its presence felt in India through Unified Payments Interface (UPI) as fintechs are partnering with banks, accessing their data and offering customised financial services to their customers. As open banking solidifies its presence in the financial services and fintech segment, companies are launching unique services, products and platforms in the space to give customers a competitive edge. APIfication of systems is inevitable.

AllCloud, founded in 2015, has been catering to the digitisation demands of financial institutions in the lending technology space. “ Technology should enable scale” has been the core belief of the founding team at AllCloud. Lending operations were highly manual and involved redundant processes. In order to enable banks and NBFCs to scale without worrying much about technology, AllCloud introduced the enterprise SaaS platform for lending businesses. Today, AllCloud provides innovative solutions to over 500 customers in India, Africa and Southeast Asia, helping to scale and optimise their operations.

AllCloud’s philosophy centres around empowering its customers with cutting-edge and scalable technology. Over the last few years, technology systems have evolved into an ecosystem of highly integrated specialised solutions. With AllCloud’s vast experience in creating secure and customer-centric SaaS solutions and working with diverse customers, creating BankCloud (a new generation, smart middleware) was the logical next step.

Creation and challenges of BankCloud

With its SaaS-based loan management system – AutoCloud – gaining recognition in the industry for its low-code approach and configurability, AllCloud turned its gaze towards creating a smart enterprise service bus platform that would enable numerous applications to interface over a highly resilient serverless architecture. Earlier, when one service provider crashed, it would bring the entire business down. There was no fail safe, no backup in place. AllCloud’s new product – BankCloud – directly addresses this problem. This new, simple open banking API stack offers enterprises the freedom to choose more than one provider for each service and touch point.

However, the initial integration of BankCloud with various service providers was one of the challenges. Tech stacks of old and new providers were completely different, and BankCloud had to find a way to work with legacy API structures as well as those employing the latest standards. Unifying the API, keeping it lean and standardising the error messages of all providers was both a trial and a triumph for the company.

What it offers

Ankith Khadloya, Co-founder, AllCloud describes BankCloud as a unified API platform which offers businesses the freedom to choose and work with multiple providers, keeping their core systems guarded by introducing BankCloud as an integrations layer for banking, payment gateways and data validations. BankCloud is built by developers for developers. Open API standards and most configurations on the UI make this platform both developer and business-friendly. The serverless API stack allows businesses to easily scale and grow with the platform. By opting for BankCloud’s serverless technology and quick deployment time, businesses will be able to cut down on costs.

Furthermore, BankCloud reduces an organisation’s time to market, as the platform is pre-integrated with various market leaders. Businesses can now hit the ground running.

Here are some of the key features of BankCloud:

• One integrations for a service
• A vendor-independent approach
• Console for all configurations
• Dashboard for analytics
• Optimised and dynamic routing

BankCloud is a smart middleware platform that solves issues in three core areas – payments, banking and data API.

Amazon Web Services (AWS) lies at the core of BankCloud’s architecture. BankCloud is delivered on a serverless stack of AWS services like AWS Lambda, Amazon DynamoDB, Amazon SQS and more. These services transform BankCloud into a hyper scalable and resilient platform. The partnership of AWS and BankCloud also reduces 80 percent of maintenance and infrastructure cost, as compared to traditional ESB applications.

Open API architecture

Agility, flexibility and security are the three hallmarks of BankCloud. The proof lies in its open API architecture, which allows customers to tailor the APIs to their own needs by making all configurations of the APIs and the platform available on the console. These configurations can then be worked on by the end-user. Additionally, the user can also add new API parameters to customise them based on their requirements. The platform also provides best-in-class security to its customers, through IP binding, HMAC authentication, AES 256 encryption and more.

Ashish Khadloya, Co-founder, AllCloud, says, “The AWS platform enabled us to take our design from development to release in a few weeks. Our choice of services was completely serverless, which allowed us to focus on application logic and business needs rather than focussing on managing servers. Serverless services like Lambda, DynamoDB come with automatic scaling, built-in high availability, and a pay-for-value billing model. The services that automatically scale from zero to peak loads enabled us to adapt to customer needs quickly and in a secure way.”

Life after the launch

At the moment, BankCloud’s teams are already working on adding more providers to its existing list. Very soon Lending APIs will be made available to businesses to create the experience of embedded finance.

BankCloud is already live with the Payments and Recurring API Platform at one of largest life insurance companies in India. The team hopes for at least four-five more enterprise rollouts by the end of this year, with a long-term plan to democratise API transactions through a global rollout. BankCloud is set to change the technology landscape by providing seamless integrations capability.

“BankCloud is a pathbreaking technology that will help ease the integration challenges of large enterprises. Our immediate plan of action is to pitch these solutions for the BFSI sector - insurance and fintechs and reach out to e-comm bigtechs,” shares Rahul Jain, Co-founder, AllCloud.

And the plans don’t stop there. The founders and their teams at BankCloud are currently working to integrate global payment gateways, API providers and banks to create one truly global platform.