The Bank of the Future Will Have Cash Vaults and Data Vaults
Posted: Tue Jan 28, 2025 4:22 am
In this exclusive interview, Hossein Rahnama, CEO and co-founder of Toronto-based Flybits , discusses how the future of financial services will be based on institutions’ ability to use contextualized insights to enrich consumers’ daily lives inside and outside of banks.
The financial services industry has seen a lot of disruption from digital alternatives. Many new financial startups, or Fintechs, are using advanced technology and expanded data sets to offer apps that provide financial solutions at a lower cost, with less croatia email list friction and more personalization than traditional bank or credit union offerings. Toronto-based startup Flybits believes that the best way to compete in the future is not just by developing innovative products and services, but by becoming the preferred repository of data, in addition to money.
“I definitely see banks being ideally placed, if they innovate correctly, to be the perfect data vaults for the future – managing their customers’ privacy as well as their data,” said Hossein Rahnama, CEO and co-founder of Flybits, in an exclusive interview for Banking Transformed, a new podcast from Jim Marous and The Financial Brand. “Using AI and machine learning , there is potential to build a ‘data marketplace’ for banks, fintechs and other data providers to partner and build more services together.”
The key is developing a platform that allows financial institutions to personalize communications with consumers based on contextual cues. For example, a bank or credit union could deliver personalized messages in a mobile app based on the consumer’s recent transaction history, current financial portfolio, calendar, and location and current activity of the person being targeted as a customer. Data and AI integration can also enable digital concierge services, enabling access to insights never before available—in real time and through the consumer’s preferred channel.
In this interview, Rahnama provides insights into how banks and credit unions can better collect and utilize data, and how traditional financial institutions can be positioned as the trusted data repository of choice in the future.
Here's some of what he had to say.
Tell me about Flybits solution for the financial sector.
Rahnama : If you look at the consumer sector, you’ll see that digital channels are becoming more predictive, more learnable, and more context-aware. Think about Siri and Apple. Think about Amazon and Alexa. Think about Google Assistant and Google Live on Google. These are next-generation digital services that can learn from their users and get better the more they use them.
In the banking world, almost every bank is trying to build such services into their digital channels – next-generation concierge services that understand their users’ needs and can adapt and deliver the right information to the right user at the right time. This is what we call “context-aware computing” or “contextualization.”
Building these types of capabilities in the past required a lot of IT processes, algorithmic knowledge, understanding of things like statistical modeling and predictive modeling. Flybits has really simplified that process for banking institutions.
So, you're talking about proactive engagement?
Rahnama : To build a capable and scalable AI strategy for banking, you need to have a lot of data and a very good data strategy around that data. Flybits empowers the bank to leverage their proprietary data assets – correlating them with external data assets – bringing the data sets together effectively to build customer logic.
They can use this logic to do better automation within the bank. They can also use this logic to better interact with their customers. But the main thing we want to highlight here is that the customer’s identifiable information is completely protected, and in some cases, the banks don’t even see the individual data. We encrypt the data and tokenize it. And even though the data is not identifiable, the financial institution can still use the data logic to interact with its customers in a more personalized way.
The financial services industry has seen a lot of disruption from digital alternatives. Many new financial startups, or Fintechs, are using advanced technology and expanded data sets to offer apps that provide financial solutions at a lower cost, with less croatia email list friction and more personalization than traditional bank or credit union offerings. Toronto-based startup Flybits believes that the best way to compete in the future is not just by developing innovative products and services, but by becoming the preferred repository of data, in addition to money.
“I definitely see banks being ideally placed, if they innovate correctly, to be the perfect data vaults for the future – managing their customers’ privacy as well as their data,” said Hossein Rahnama, CEO and co-founder of Flybits, in an exclusive interview for Banking Transformed, a new podcast from Jim Marous and The Financial Brand. “Using AI and machine learning , there is potential to build a ‘data marketplace’ for banks, fintechs and other data providers to partner and build more services together.”
The key is developing a platform that allows financial institutions to personalize communications with consumers based on contextual cues. For example, a bank or credit union could deliver personalized messages in a mobile app based on the consumer’s recent transaction history, current financial portfolio, calendar, and location and current activity of the person being targeted as a customer. Data and AI integration can also enable digital concierge services, enabling access to insights never before available—in real time and through the consumer’s preferred channel.
In this interview, Rahnama provides insights into how banks and credit unions can better collect and utilize data, and how traditional financial institutions can be positioned as the trusted data repository of choice in the future.
Here's some of what he had to say.
Tell me about Flybits solution for the financial sector.
Rahnama : If you look at the consumer sector, you’ll see that digital channels are becoming more predictive, more learnable, and more context-aware. Think about Siri and Apple. Think about Amazon and Alexa. Think about Google Assistant and Google Live on Google. These are next-generation digital services that can learn from their users and get better the more they use them.
In the banking world, almost every bank is trying to build such services into their digital channels – next-generation concierge services that understand their users’ needs and can adapt and deliver the right information to the right user at the right time. This is what we call “context-aware computing” or “contextualization.”
Building these types of capabilities in the past required a lot of IT processes, algorithmic knowledge, understanding of things like statistical modeling and predictive modeling. Flybits has really simplified that process for banking institutions.
So, you're talking about proactive engagement?
Rahnama : To build a capable and scalable AI strategy for banking, you need to have a lot of data and a very good data strategy around that data. Flybits empowers the bank to leverage their proprietary data assets – correlating them with external data assets – bringing the data sets together effectively to build customer logic.
They can use this logic to do better automation within the bank. They can also use this logic to better interact with their customers. But the main thing we want to highlight here is that the customer’s identifiable information is completely protected, and in some cases, the banks don’t even see the individual data. We encrypt the data and tokenize it. And even though the data is not identifiable, the financial institution can still use the data logic to interact with its customers in a more personalized way.