Financial services elephants need the little guys

afr.com:

Global banking regulation has bolstered the case for bigger is better when it comes to financial services in the current age. But the bigger banks grow, the harder it is to innovate the types of solutions that deliver step-changes for customers.

Focused, agile fintechs are emerging thick and fast, helping the banking elephants to tie their shoelaces by solving parts of a puzzle that keeps growing as banks are forced to layer system upon legacy system and swim against the surging tide of regulation.

Andrew Laycock, founder and chief executive of Shaype.  Steven Siewert

The winner of the financial services category in the AFR BOSS Most Innovative Companies awards, Shaype, encapsulates how fintechs are delivering for bank customers by working collaboratively alongside the big guys.

Shaype is best known for reshaping Commonwealth Bank of Australia’s Dollarmites accounts into Kit.

Since March this year, it has been deploying ShaypeWear as a layer that sits between core banking, legacy systems and the APIs that banks now plug in to help smooth delivery of services.

“ShaypeWear allows us to ingest data in any format. It can come from a 30-year-old core banking system that a bank has been running on for decades and transfer the information into a more modern format of data,” says founder and chief executive Andrew Laycock.

This eliminates the need for manual, time-consuming and costly intervention and allows banks to move much more quickly in responding to customer needs.

“We’ll give you all the missing ingredients as part of your recipe to bring a new service to market, and as a part of that we’ll give you this ShaypeWear layer,” says Laycock.

But given the huge regulatory push, Laycock says Shaype is focusing its efforts