At Finastra we believe the future of finance is open. Collaboration with partners is crucial to success for banks, fintechs and other ecosystem players alike. Innovation can be dramatically accelerated through open collaboration – for the benefit of all.
Building a strong partner ecosystem that delivers real value to end customers requires an investment of time and resources and a willingness to collaborate closely on both sides. Effective partner collaboration allows us to innovate together and create new and unique joint value propositions optimized for the needs of our customers.
It also allows us to develop fully integrated propositions that go beyond what Finastra and the partner can offer separately.
Choice of routes to market
Finastra has refreshed the ways we engage, enable, go to market and ultimately how we succeed together with our partners.
As part of our new Fusion Orbit partner program, we’ve identified four routes to market that will help us drive partner and ecosystem success:
- Implement: This is about partners originating the business, bringing opportunities to us. We will help co-sell, but also help the partner to do the deal on their own. We put a lot of emphasis on tech, sales and marketing enablement and use digital sales to empower partners and help them succeed.
- Resell: These are full-service partners in geographies we are not in, or that we will never go into. There’s the potential for the partner to take on a whole geography and run everything from marketing to support in that territory, almost becoming little Finastra subsidiaries. We offer these partners sales and marketing enablement, demo capability as well as the tech aspects and support.
- Manage: Not all banks want to manage an application or infrastructure themselves. By setting up managed service operations, partners can work with Finastra to deliver the core functionality and capability of proven Finastra solutions to customers on a modular and scalable basis. Managed services offer lots of potential for growth.
- Co-Innovate: Together we work with partners to co-create solutions that capture the power of innovation in the Finastra ecosystem and the capabilities of our platform to deliver a competitive edge in the market. This includes spotting market opportunities, filling gaps and creating new product lines or super-localised solutions that augment what we already have.
Partners are already co-innovating with Finastra in three main ways today:
- Innovation based on new services offered via the cloud that add value to Finastra’s product solutions, offering a standardized and repeatable approach for a number of customers;
- Innovation based on development of the ecosystem around our products. This could be where a partner is enhancing one of Finastra’s product solutions, integrating through an app developed for that purpose, or integrating with an existing solution that complements and extends Finastra’s product solution;
- Innovation that’s based on a one-of-a-kind initiative where Finastra and the partner invest significantly to create a breakthrough solution in the market.
Collaboration and co-marketing
Working closely with our partners through our four routes to market means we can deliver better experiences for our mutual customers. To help achieve this, we are providing our partners with proactive account planning and sales engagement; faster go-to-market activities through targeted sales enablement and implementation, training and direct access to our highly skilled Partner Account Managers and solution experts.
Together we are building market-focused branding to increase awareness and relevant go-to-market campaigns. This includes working with our partners to:
- Create engaging, market-specific joint value propositions and campaigns
- Enabling our reseller partners with marketing tools and campaigns in a box
- Build and develop quantifiable customer case studies to demonstrate proven success
- Leverage our best-in-class partner ecosystem to enhance selling opportunities
We are already running co-marketing programs with several partners, including Accenture, Capgemini, Infosys and ITC Infotech around the joint value propositions we’ve created together.
Benefits that stand out
Finastra stands out from competitors in the way we recruit, onboard and scale partners. We make it attractive for partners to make money with us. As partners invest and show their commitment, we are proactive in helping them accelerate their pipeline and drive success. Partners also have the opportunity to grow with Finastra given our broad portfolio of solution offerings.
