Wissam Khoury, SVP & General Manager, APAC & MEA, Finastra • Interview

SVP & GENERAL MANAGER, APAC & MEA, FINASTRA

What is Finastra’s role in Dubai’s fintech ecosystem?

Finastra was formed in 2017 from the merger of two fintech giants, Misys and D+H. We have over 8,500 customers globally, including 90 of the top 100 banks. Over the past two years, Finastra has moved from being a solutions provider to a platform company with the launch of FusionFabric.cloud, our platform for open innovation. We are changing the way financial services software is developed, deployed, and consumed like no one else by building the foundations of a completely new financial services ecosystem and marketplace. We are also opening up our APIs for core retail banking, payments, corporate banking, lending, and treasury and capital markets and enabling the wider ecosystem to build on top of them to increase innovation and offer better services to a growing market.

How are you forcing banks to be more innovative?

There are a mix of factors. Consumer trends, mobile adoption, the rise of fintechs, and changing regulations are all driving innovation in the industry. We enable banks to be more innovative by supplying them with the technical details to do this. For example, in the event a bank wants to develop an application to provide customers with a single view of all its relationships across different departments, the traditional way of providing this is time-intensive; by the time the product is ready, the market will already have shifted. It is vital to understand that the only constant is change. The end user has been pampered for so long that they demand from their banks the same services they get from their retail experiences. If they can get a fast service from Uber, then why not from their bank? This has pushed banks to be more innovative in creating better customer services. ✖