Seattle Bank is preparing to enter the banking as a service and embedded finance markets as part of its digital banking and post-core conversion strategy.

The $752 million bank is exploring microservices, moving to the cloud and establishing vendor relationships with API-first, open-banking capabilities. The bank completed its core conversion to Finastra’s Fusion Phoenix in October 2019, Jayson Callies, executive vice president and chief information and innovation officer at Seattle Bank, said this week during the panel discussion “In the air: How to develop for the cloud in order to enable technology strategy” at Bank Automation Summit Fall 2022 in Seattle.

“We’re now looking into moving into some different markets,” Callies said, pointing out that the bank’s move to Finastra, which offers open API integrations and is available on the cloud via Microsoft Azure, enables easier fintech collaboration.

However, partnering with new fintechs is not always a simple undertaking, Callies said. Seattle Bank has several considerations when entering new deals.

• Regulatory scrutiny: Fintechs may pitch products that would, if implemented, trigger regulators. Ensuring that a pitch can withstand regulatory scrutiny is the first step before entering into an agreement, Callies said.
• Department support: “You need to get all the different departments on board right away when you’re talking to these vendors and looking at these opportunities,” he said.
• Potential earnings: “Can we all make money?” Callies said. The key is to get in tune with the business side of the bank to determine if a partnership will ultimately cost the bank more than it’s worth.

In August Seattle Bank partnered with the fintech SavvyMoney, which allows customers to offer bank clients access their updated credit scores any time through its digital banking platform, according to a bank release.