Oradian and Geniusto: Making the most of a partnership.

Geniusto International is a Perth, Western Australia-based technology ‘enabler’ for banks and credit unions, payment providers, remittance companies, and eMoney issuers.

Oradian, headquartered in Zagreb, Croatia, offers an extensible, cloud-native core banking solution optimised for financial institutions in emerging markets. The two groups have formed a partnership. IBS Intelligence asked Antonio Separovic [AS], Co- Founder & CEO, Oradian, and Matthew Edmunds [ME], Group CEO, Geniusto International to explain the background to their partnership venture:

[AS] “Oradian provides the native-cloud core banking platform forming the architecture layer that underpins all our customers’ business operations, including accounting, loan management and products, with a suite of services fully enabling any mainstream lender or neobank providing financial services to its end-clients. From the very beginning, we designed our system with an accessible and simple API architecture layer to enable third parties, like Genuisto, to plug in and add functionality that further enhances our customers’ offerings to their end clients.”

[ME] “Geniusto and Oradian were initially brought together by our mutual customer Cantilan Bank in the Philippines. It was clear from the beginning that there is an excellent synergy between the two companies in terms of philosophy and approach to delivering world class, flexible, and scalable solutions for banks and non-bank financial institutions. The two product sets nicely complement each other to provide a complete suite of tools for a financial institution to fully address the post-Covid digital landscape.”

“APIs are what have enabled the partnership with Genuisto. We work using REST APIs that are very well documented and connect with every part of the core system. This makes it simple for partners like Geniusto to hook in their technology layer and deliver a seamless service for our mutual customers.”

[ME] “At the heart of the Geniusto Suite is our API integration Hub tool [GO] Connect. This allows us to connect to a multitude of different systems and services using almost any messaging format. Where new services are needed, it is a fairly simple matter to update API capabilities with new parameters or data fields that ensure that changes can be executed rapidly keeping costs and time to market down for customers.”

Does low code/no code give sufficient flexibility to the bank/financial institution?

[AS] “The low-code approach to development is all about usability out of the box. It makes it extremely simple to launch and configure new features, and to respond to wants and disruptions without needing teams of developers with specific programming knowledge.

“We operate on the principle of ‘extensible banking’. Our users can adapt and configure their core banking system without coding knowledge and without waiting on our developers to deliver changes for them. They can do this, for instance, using custom fields, that allow them to configure their own inputs when gathering data that are not included in the core banking system as standard. Extensibility allows businesses to innovate, adapt and differentiate themselves quickly without long development cycles and without additional cost from the supplier.”

[ME] “A low code approach to delivering applications provides considerable advantages for the customer. In many cases, business users can themselves configure the solution to perform in the manner that they prefer without the need to engage expensive technical resources. In addition, they can configure and save new services
and products in minutes rather than days or weeks. This offers cost efficiency and considerable savings for the institution. This is especially important for small banks who lack the size or operational budgets to pay for costly modifications.”

What markets are you focusing on and why?

[AS] “Oradian has grown from serving last-mile communities across Sub-Saharan Africa and Southeast Asia, and those continue to be the markets where demand for financial services will grow over the next two decades. Most of our customers are based in Nigeria and the Philippines, and we have been expanding outwards into other geographies such Kenya, Vietnam, and India.

“These are exciting, dynamic, and diverse economies with the highest potential for FinTech growth. For instance, Vietnam has an unbanked population of 69%, but smartphone coverage of 67.8%, so there is a huge untapped market for innovative lenders and neobanks to deliver financial services to these underserved communities. What’s key is reducing barriers to entry for new players who want to move and grow fast, while also making the technology as accessible as possible for those looking to serve last-mile communities.”

[ME] “Initially we are focusing on the Southeast Asian markets with two live projects in the Philippines and several more in the pipeline for 2023. Having now spent a year working together and learning about each other’s technologies, we are now building a tighter, joint, ‘Go to Market’ strategy for Southeast Asia and Africa. We will be jointly sponsoring a number of high-profile banking industry events and we are developing a joint product offering that will provide additional savings for customers by purchasing a ‘package offering’.”

How will your partnership develop?

[AS] “At present we are working together to support our customers to accelerate their digitisation strategy and enable them to access the absolute best tech while lowering the barriers (and cost) for entry. The partnership with Genuisto is in its infancy but is already bearing fruit for Oradian customers. Both partners know there is much work to complete. We have only just begun delivering on the benefits of working together.

“We have two active implementations of Oradian’s banking system and Genusto’s mobile banking layer with large banks and lenders in the Philippines and from here we are looking for ways to support our customers to further grow their reach with innovative, flexible and accessible cloud solutions.”

[ME] “There is a great synergy between the two organisations in terms of philosophy and approach. This is essential for the success of any partnership. By combining forces, we can leverage each other’s strengths and share both ideas and costs. In essence, the sum of the parts is greater than the whole. We will continue to work more closely together on joint marketing and sales operations, and we will continue to fine tune our operational processes and technologies to lower the cost of implementation and accelerate ‘time to money’ for our customers.”

This interview was originally published by IBS Intelligence.