Evolution of Nations Trust Bank's Open Banking Story

Established in 1999, Nations Trust Bank (NTB) is one of the largest private banks in Sri Lanka with branches located throughout the island. They’re not new to introducing novel concepts and innovation. NTB was the first bank in the country to introduce 365-day banking and they’ve recently pioneered open banking in Sri Lanka. One of their innovations is FriMi - which also happens to be Sri Lanka’s first digital bank, mobile wallet, and payment system that is fast gaining in popularity. In fact, NTB was named one of the top 30 local business establishments and FriMi was named as one of the country’s top 30 financial institutions by the Asian Banker magazine.

Pioneers in Open Banking

Unlike other parts of the world, NTB was not driven by regulatory needs to introduce open banking. They wanted to align their strategies to cater to changing customer expectations and enable collaboration and data sharing within financial services providers in the country. By doing so, NTB was seeking to create new business opportunities and partnerships with startups. Since NTB offers a vast range of services for their customers, their main challenge was ensuring that no service disrupts the functioning of another service and inconveniences customers in the process.

Nisala Kodippili, the chief information officer at NTB, explains that one of the main issues they faced were the many integrations done at different times and at different levels. NTB’s ATMs and mobile and internet banking services used different APIs. This created a scenario where there was a discrepancy in the account balance displayed when customers accessed their accounts via ATMs compared to when they viewed their accounts using mobile banking! NTB managed to solve this problem by developing a method where they use a single API and to avoid these issues faced by customers. Ironically this set the stage for a bigger problem. Whenever there was an issue with one API, the entire stack is disrupted making this a single point of failure for everything. When this happens, the only way to bring in a new service is to build multiple APIs from multiple systems and identity management at multiple levels is not an easy task.

The Right Technology

To manage the different identities and APIs better, NTB turned to WSO2 Open Banking. Leveraging WSO2’s API management, security, and integration capabilities, WSO2 Open Banking provides the technology for open APIs, third party services, and digital transformation of financial services. It is built on architecture that can scale to deliver compliance for different deployment sizes. “Maintenance is simple, if there are any changes you have to go through the API Manager and do the modifications,” says Nisala. NTB’s new architecture is created in such a way where only one identity is needed for various applications, enabling them to collaborate all identities onto one platform.

Thanks to their new solution, NTB is now able to integrate easily with any new third party within a week. Nisala says that he and his team were astounded by the improvements, “It’s simply a matter of somebody consuming our API and even I didn’t expect the other service providers to follow us. But I’m proud to say that service providers and other third-party integrators who are working together are willing to move to the standard level. They are consuming our APIs very quickly.

Customer Satisfaction is Key

Customers who want to make any changes to their account now only need to make this change once and it reflects on all other services. Security has also improved and NTB has extensive monitoring capabilities where they can control the level of APIs consumed by a single party. “It’s very easy, even at the merchant level we can control the API consume levels,” Nisala explains. Using single sign-on for all applications has helped them to eradicate the issue of duplication of identity. WSO2 Identity Server manages this for NTB, regardless of what the third party application or any other application brings in. This has improved the user experience tremendously.

Nisala says that NTB has unlocked their true potential by venturing into open banking and their new architecture which is free from single point failure has helped them reach new heights. “WSO2 has enabled us to build, scale, and secure sophisticated integration solutions to achieve our digital agility,” says Nisala.

To learn more about NTB’s open banking journey, watch Nisala’s presentation.

Curious to learn more about WSO2 Open Banking? Everything you need to know is here.