Latinia has been a leading developer of real-time decision and communication software products aimed at the financial sector for more than 20 years. What has it achieved as a company? How is it defining its value proposition? What is Latinia’s position on cloud adoption in the banking industry? Marc Alcón, CTO of Latinia, addresses these questions in the following interview.
Where does Latinia currently stand as a company?
We are very pleased with our accomplishments, particularly in Latin America. Now that we have consolidated our presence in the leading banks in that region, our next challenge is to make the leap to the United States and continue to strengthen our position throughout the American continent.
What is your current value proposition and how has it evolved since its inception?
Our value proposition has evolved over the years. Latinia’s strategy based on facilitating communication with bank clients has progressed, bringing us to a place of being an active player in proactive customer communication initiatives thanks to the development of our Real-Time Analysis and Notification engines.
What are the major achievements of the Latinia team in recent years?
We are a benchmark brand in the sector and this is undoubtedly the result of a job well done by a team of committed experts throughout the company’s history. This recognition has allowed us to continue growing in the different markets Latinia is present, as well as consolidating and expanding our customer base.
How has product implementation changed over the years? What improvements have been made?
The implementation process of our products must give way to increasingly frictionless integration procedures. If clients require implementation, the process must be accompanied by Pipeline-based models and, whenever possible, supported by IaaC deployment models for the required infrastructure.
How did the idea of developing a product like Next Best Action (NBA) come about?
NBA originated as a response to requests from our clients, who expressed the need to expand the use of our alerts product, a parameterizable subscription engine in which the rules are defined by the banking customer, deciding what, how and when they want to receive notifications from their financial institution. In developing Next Best Action (NBA), the objective was to design an engine in which the rules are defined and adjusted to the products that the bank wants to promote, based on the financial reality and movement of the client’s own real-time events.
What are the advantages and benefits of your Real-Time Analytics products?
Most of the transactional event analytics products available on the market work by batch, i.e. by reviewing a past reality, or by polling, which is done against events that have already gone through the bank. In the case of Latinia’s Real-Time engines, they are natively integrated with core stream events or payment platforms, providing real-time analysis that allows the activation of rules appropriate to the moment in which the financial situation is unfolding.
What is the future of Real-Time Analysis of financial events?
At Latinia we envision a future for banking that is clearly aimed toward technologies such as Blockchain and open data streams between different entities. Technological trends are leading us towards more interconnected models, and greater integration of third-party subscription with Open Banking ecosystems in Fintech, to provide the sector with enhanced interoperability, which in turn generates more business opportunities for the financial industry.
Another one of the most relevant technological trends for banking today is cloud adoption. What is Latinia’s position with respect to this technology?
This technology has enormous potential, therefore, our commitment is to accompany all financial institutions ready to take advantage of the benefits of cloud computing, as long as the local regulator allows it, since unfortunately, we continue to encounter significant barriers caused by the regulations of individual countries that prevent us from accelerating its implementation and adoption. The technology change projects currently underway are focused on moving away from reliance on monolithic architectures to work on more modular platforms that run on MicroServices and related content, on Service Orchestration such as Kubernetes. This first stage of cloud adoption allows us to provide our customers with more elastic models that are already adapted to the standards of this technology.
What are the advantages for clients of implementing Latinia’s products in the cloud?
One of the greatest benefits of cloud adoption is improving the efficiency of infrastructure use and, therefore, the accounting of business areas. The cloud enables greater adaptability to business-generated opportunities with a more elastic technology model, as well as reducing dependence on infrastructure areas to provide a better time-to-market for the adoption of new services. Territorial availability is also expanded, with native multi-zone deployments versus native CPD models. Another clear advantage is the reduction of known vulnerabilities of the stack that makes up the service, thanks to the higher degree of maintainability provided by the cloud.
How is Latinia helping its clients in this process of migrating from on-premise to cloud infrastructures, and what projects have already been carried out?
The support we are providing banks that wish to embark on the cloud adoption journey is based on our experience with other entities, with whom we have already worked together with new Cloud areas created by the bank, or other external providers. We work to define a migration plan to intermediate architectures based on microservices and Kubernetes, or on solutions that take a cloud-native path, with the aim of adapting to each entity, and offering the best technological advice.
Categories: Cloud & Tech