Kansas City-based nbkc bank is building a conversational banking app with Finastra on the vendor’s growing FusionFabric.cloud open platform.

The digital-savvy community bank, which uses Finastra’s Phoenix core banking solution, wants to be at the forefront of new and evolving communication channels to ensure it can meet customers wherever and however they want to do their banking, said Eric Garretson, CFO and fintech strategy leader at nbkc. He credited Finastra’s expanding suite of APIs for a faster, cheaper development process that will allow the bank to “innovate in other areas as well.”

Garretson told Bank Innovation that nbkc has a roughly 14-year relationship with Finastra and that the vendor had approached the bank to gauge its interest in developing a proof of concept for conversational banking. He could not provide a timeline for when the bank will roll out the app to customers, adding that they have yet to discuss pricing.

“We have all this data on our customers, but we’ve done a really horrible job doing anything with it,” Garretson said, adding that nbkc immediately saw value in adding a channel for customers to interact with the bank. However, he noted that nbkc has not yet surveyed its customers to measure their interest in voice banking specifically.

Asked whether the bank could feasibly build its own conversational banking app without the use of an open banking platform like Finastra’s, Garretson noted that nbkc has an internal development team but the artificial intelligence and machine learning expertise needed to power such apps is missing.

Martin Häring, Chief Marketing Officer at Finastra, told Bank Innovation that community banks like nbkc are coming under “enormous” pressure in terms of delivering the desired customer experience. “They have to compete with the large banks and they have to compete with the large amounts of innovation dollars that the large banks have, which they don’t,” he said. “What they are looking for is a fast way to innovate in order to compete with the big brand names in the U.S.”

According to Häring, banks can connect their retail core systems to conversational devices like Cortana, Siri or Alexa and enable those devices to talk with Finastra’s back-end systems in a matter of weeks. “You can call up account information, you can make payments transfer and these kinds of things,” he said.

Asked about its interest in building voice banking capabilities itself, Häring said Finastra really wants to concentrate on building out the back-end and supporting developers. “We want to open up our bank APIs to really let fintechs innovate on top,” he said. “We don’t want to be in the cognitive industry; that is not our business, and we would be late to the table on that. We want to help others develop that.”

To this end, Finastra is working with “three or four” fintechs in the conversational banking space, as well as strategic partner Microsoft, which Häring said has “a huge range of cognitive technologies like face recognition, voice recognition and all these skills that fintechs can make use of.”

According to Häring, banks on Finastra’s open platform aren’t stuck with the technology that the vendor itself provides but can shop around the ecosystem and mix and match functionality. “They would kind of look around in our ecosystem and say, ‘OK, maybe for a new onboarding technology we are using the face recognition from Microsoft and, for voice recognition, we are using other technology from third parties,'” he explained. “In that space, there are probably five, six or seven vendors out there who are delivering similar capabilities. It’s more up to nbkc to decide what they will use.”

Other banking software firms have developed similar platforms, such as Temenos with its MarketPlace, which provides customers with access to Temenos-certified apps that are fully integrated with the latest release of the Temenos platform. MarketPlace includes products for security, compliance, user experience and analytics.

Häring said one of Finastra’s key differentiators is its close connection with Microsoft Azure’s cloud services, which are widely used across the industry. The vendor’s “strong alignment” with the Azure architecture is a different approach from other vendors, which have tended to maintain “a very closed, proprietary product strategy,” he added.

Separately, Finastra also announced on Monday an expansion of its open platform capabilities and an extended collaboration with Microsoft Azure for the build-out of mortgage and loan workflows. The vendor revealed 61 new additions to its API catalog for developers — with uses spanning retail and corporate banking, consumer lending and mortgages, payments and treasury and capital markets.