Supporting both Innovation and Interoperability in a Maturing Market
Created by Ben King, Head of Architecture at Bink
As industry sectors mature, the pattern of cyclical innovation becomes almost inevitable. Where growing businesses increasingly interoperate to drive the creation of partnerships and multi-party ecosystems to deliver products and services, the technology solutions that underpin them evolve from standalone solutions, to integrated solutions and, ultimately, to standards-based networks of systems working together.
In areas where such interoperability is fundamental to the business proposition, such as in payments processing, standards like ISO 15022 are matured and adopted to the degree where changes require many years to define, introduce and roll out (e.g. ISO 20022). This makes the introduction of innovative features either frustratingly periodic or only deliverable outside of the existing ecosystem. In the retail space, it is crucial that merchants can quickly innovate to deliver customer propositions to engage consumers in new and unique ways. Customer experience, CRM, clienteling and customer loyalty products typically address these challenges through the provision of an array of bespoke, independent solutions. As a result, the capability for easy interoperability is frequently lost.
With the loss of easy interoperability, so the opportunity for extending the reach of a customer offering is limited to a select few use cases and a select few partners. As a consequence, the merchants’ proposition have their exposure limited to those direct channels which are managed by the merchant themselves.
At Bink, we leverage the experience of our team across sectors to augment a Domain-Driven Design approach to our solutions. By modelling our systems with both a historic and forward-thinking view, we can build solutions that deliver consistency where necessary, but support rapid extension and evolution. With a single integration with Bink, this allows our partners to present new and innovative loyalty offerings through multiple channels – including Bank channels.
How does Bink achieve this?
A Microservices-Based Open Architecture enables functional abstraction within the Bink solution, allowing the solution to flex to integrate with legacy and modern, standards-based and bespoke partner systems. Bink systems use these paradigms to provide a combination of strong core capabilities alongside the integration flexibility necessary to work in a constantly evolving technical landscape. This enables us to deliver coherent and fast-to-market solutions across loyalty, payments and consumer banking sectors, without ever losing sight of the customer.