LeverX Accelerates Financial Innovation With SAP BTP for Open Banking

How LeverX enabled open banking with SAP BTP – creating personalized financial services, integrating fintech platforms like SWIFT and Bloomberg, and delivering scalable mobile banking applications without impacting core systems.

In the modern digital world, financial institutions, including leading global banks, face the need to provide personalized and mobile financial services, as well as seamlessly integrate with external fintech services. The challenge lies in doing this without disrupting existing core banking systems.

LeverX helped one of its clients, a major financial organization, solve these problems using SAP BTP. The solution enables the creation of modern applications with a personalized customer experience and ensures secure data exchange with external services, leading to increased customer engagement and conversion.

Client and Challenge

A large financial organization, striving for digital transformation, faced significant challenges in delivering personalized, mobile financial services. Their goal to fully leverage their modern S/4HANA platform was hampered by a deeply entrenched, on-premises landscape built around core legacy components such as SAP Banking Services (TRBK) and Consumer and Mortgage Loans (CML). This siloed architecture prevented them from seamlessly integrating with external fintechs and from implementing open banking concepts, hindering client acquisition and retention.

The key challenges the client faced included:

• Lack of Personalization: The client couldn't provide recommendations or services tailored to customer behavior, resulting in low engagement and conversion rates. Their customers received generic offers that didn't match their individual financial needs and habits.
• Integration Complexity: Integrating with new fintech services and implementing open banking concepts required complex, cumbersome solutions that could disrupt adherence to Clean Core principles in existing systems. This process was costly and risky, as any changes to core banking systems could lead to failures and complicate future updates.
• Inflexibility of Legacy Systems: Traditional banking systems often couldn't support a modern mobile and digital experience, limiting innovation.

Solution

LeverX developed a comprehensive solution on SAP BTP that provided the client with a flexible and secure platform for creating modern cloud applications, adhering to the SAP Clean Core principles. This allowed for extending functionality without changing the core systems.

The solution enabled the client to:

• Create a Personalized Customer Experience: By using built-in AI, for example, via SAP AI Foundation, LeverX helped the client provide personalized recommendations and services based on user behavior , which significantly increased their engagement and conversion rate. The system analyzes transactional data streams to create a behavioral profile, based on which relevant products are offered.
• Ensure Seamless Integration: The platform securely connects to essential third-party services without altering the core. Using SAP Integration Suite, it seamlessly integrates with critical market data providers such as Bloomberg and Refinitiv, payment systems such as SWIFT, and the broader fintech ecosystem via a library of robust APIs and Open Connectors.
• Develop Mobile Applications with an Intuitive Interface: New applications were built with an intuitive, mobile-first user experience, leveraging the SAP Fiori design system. To achieve this, a hybrid development strategy was employed, using low-code SAP Build Apps for rapid delivery and SAP Business Application Studio for custom UI5 development.

Technology Stack

The solution is built on a scalable and integrated SAP technology stack:

• Core Platform: SAP BTP — provides a centralized and secure environment for developing and running applications.
• App Development: SAP Build Apps for low-code development and SAP Build Code/Business Application Studio for professional developers utilizing Fiori guidelines for complex custom interfaces.
• Integration: SAP Integration Suite — ensures the management of APIs and Open Connectors for seamless data exchange with relevant providers independently of the interfaces provided.
• Database: SAP HANA Cloud — is used for high-performance, real-time data processing and storage of operational data.
• AI Functionality: SAP AI Core or SAP AI Foundation — provides the embedding of AI functions to create personalized recommendations.

Results

Implementing the solution led to significant, measurable business benefits for the client.

• Improved Customer Engagement & Conversion: Personalized recommendations and a modern, mobile-first interface led to a significant increase in customer interaction and conversion rates. The enhanced digital experience has directly improved customer satisfaction and loyalty.
• Flexibility and Scalability: The new architecture provides a fast, flexible path to integrate with new fintech services and adapt to changing market needs, turning the IT landscape into a competitive advantage.
• Adherence to "Clean Core" Strategy: By building all new applications outside the core banking systems, we ensured adherence to this critical principle. This strategy eliminated integration risks, reduced future upgrade costs, and guaranteed the long-term agility of their primary SAP systems.