As a bank, your present concerns revolve around generating ample liquidity at least possible cost to fuel business growth as well as comply with tightening capital regulations. Hurt by the financial crisis, your customers are looking to rebuild their savings. Consequently, bank deposits are back in fashion and focus.

Perhaps your bank is considering merging with another institution in order to acquire new customer accounts, in addition to pursuing a strategy of organic growth. However, your legacy systems are proving to be a stumbling block, unable to support the massive consolidation or marketing efforts needed to support these ambitions. Modernizing the core is an obvious solution, but you simply cannot afford the costs of a full-blown implementation. What you want is to be able to dramatically increase your business without busting your budget.

This is now easily possible thanks to an innovative implementation model called the Bank in a Box, which enables quick and economical installation at smaller institutions, and the emergence of new payment models, listed below, which allow banks to incur expenditure on core banking modernization in line with actual usage.

• Pay as you go: This model allows segment 3 and other small banks to invest collaboratively in a Bank in a Box solution in order to reduce their individual expenditure.
• Outsourced/Application Service Provider-based: In this model, client banks can subscribe selectively to various applications hosted at the site of their technology vendor or a third party, and pay only for what they need.
• Software as a Service (SaaS): The SaaS model takes the above concept one step further, delivering and charging for applications only on demand.
• Core banking solution on a cloud: In this model, the bank and their technology partner jointly decide on the applications to be hosted in an external “cloud” environment, for subsequent sharing with other users. Since the costs are spread over multiple banks paying only for actual usage, the solution becomes affordable even for segment 3 and other smaller institutions.

From a technology perspective, the ability of a bank to enlarge its business depends upon the capacity and limitations of its systems. In all the above cases, the responsibility of maintaining physical hardware and hosting the applications lies with the technology vendors or third parties having access to infrastructure resources. Consequently, ramping up capacity to handle a sudden increase in core banking business including deposit and savings accounts is a cinch. Indeed, in some cases, hosting a core banking application in an outside location can catalyze business expansion in that geography.