Creating a fully digital, customer-centric banking experience, Ben Goldin, Founder & CEO, Plumery

By Robin Amlot

Plumery won ‘Best Digital Channel/Platform Implementation: Most Impactful Project,’ at the latest Global FinTech Innovation Awards

Ben Goldin is the Founder and Chief Executive Officer of Plumery. His career includes time at the likes of Mambu and Backbase but his focus on the digital banking arena began as a teenager! He told IBS Intelligence: “I’ve been passionate about digital banking or Internet banking as it used to be called when I started my journey since my teenage years. It was then I started building products and technology for banks. I had the privilege to build or be part of building a number of banking products in core banking, in digital banking.

“What I still see today is that modern technology that provides delightful experiences for people in digital banking is still not accessible to a long tail of banks globally. Top tier banks like HSBC, Barclays, Citi and others have built huge teams and developed the digital banking experience to a certain level. However, if we look at the global landscape, There are close to 50,000 financial institutions globally. Only a handful of them can do what the HSBCs of this world are doing. We want to democratise technology for any type of financial institution globally and make sure people can have a delightful digital banking experience as a result of that.”

Plumery won ‘Best Digital Channel/Platform Implementation: Most Impactful Project,’ at the latest Global FinTech Innovation Awards. What do you think made the project stand out?

“The award is a testament to Plumery’s commitment to empowering financial institutions with scalable, innovative solutions that
prioritise customer experience and drive financial inclusion. I think it’s the speed to market, along with readily available capabilities and technology we provide, that helps banks not only to launch faster, but launch faster with more than justs a cut-down MVP – with a platform that enables everyday consumers to access banking services digitally via mobile and web.

“The app, whose implementation we were part of, offers round-the-clock services, including online account opening, virtual cards, personalised financial tools, and exclusive benefits such as eCommerce and hospitality deals – all seamlessly delivered through
a highly intuitive interface.

We remain committed to enabling financial institutions to create innovative, customer-centric digital banking experiences, helping them succeed in an evolving financial landscape.”

Plumery recently launched a digital lending solution – what makes it stand out in the marketplace?

“First of all, why does digital lending matter? Both from a consumer and a bank’s perspective? From a consumer perspective, both businesses and individuals want to have access to money, to credit when they need it. And, ideally, embedded within the context of their day-to-day experiences. For instance, once they buy airplane tickets or do some other purchases where they potentially would want to leverage credit from a bank.

“From a bank perspective, banks, both new banks and traditional banks, realise that profits matter. And the classic way of making profits for banks is obviously selling money, which is issuing loans and issuing credits. And doing it faster and being able to do it in an inclusive way, including as many segments of the population as possible, while maintaining the desired risk balance, is very important for financial institutions.

“Our platform helps digitise an entire end-to-end digital lending experience, provide a scoring and decision engine that can leverage multiple data sources and multiple attributes of data to do precise scoring and provide lending to a broader set of populations and a broader set of segments that were traditionally excluded from this type of service, either because it was too expensive to serve them or because the risk was deemed too high.

“We are addressing both problems. We are lowering overall origination and customer acquisition costs and reducing risk by applying sophisticated risk scoring models, leveraging AI where necessary, and where possible, to perform loan scoring and decisioning. And by doing so, we are broadening the overall population that we can cover.”

What is next for Plumery?

“Obviously, AI is a big thing these days and we are working on agentic AI capabilities that will help banks define and build their own AI agents for different purposes; anything from the already typical AI-driven chatbots to fully autonomous hyper-personalisation engines and recommendation engines to collections and self-service using AI-assisted ways.”

How does Plumery enable financial institutions to deliver more customer-centric digital banking experiences?

“We provide an operating system, an open platform that combines the acceleration of buying ready-to-use capabilities with the flexibility to differentiate where it matters the most for banks. So, it’s a combination of buy and build, probably in the best possible way. We call this approach ‘buy for feature parity, build for competitive edge’.

You’ve secured multiple partnerships with FinTechs and core banking providers. What’s your strategic approach to partnerships?

“We believe in composable architecture, the composable banking approach. It is all about combining what’s available from others with what we do best into a holistic and seamlessly integrated platform. And it always starts, obviously, with core banking providers because that is fundamentally the system of record for everything we provide in digital channels.

“We typically separate systems of record from systems of engagement. Core banking systems are systems of record for main banking data, whereas we are a system of engagement. So, core banking vendors are our main partners. But in addition to that, we work with KYC and AML providers who do their own job in the best possible way by validating documents, by validating the identity of a person, by retrieving, let’s say, verification data of companies, and a number of other partners who do their own job in the best possible way.

“The process is completely transparent. Once we pre-integrate these partners, the journey of using a combined solution becomes much easier for banks. But at the same time, it is still possible to replace each part individually once they decide to leverage something that is better for them at that point in time.”

How do you see the future of digital banking evolving, and what role does Plumery play in shaping it?

“I think digital banking, as a concept, been evolving for a while – from being just a place where people see their balance and possibly make payments, into lifestyle applications where people can solve day-to day life challenges and get a much more personalised experience, with a lot of advice and services beyond just the transactional operations that were available to users 20 years ago.

“We just recently launched Lifestyle Banking, transitioning from a purely transactional experience to something that integrates daily life aspects of people into a single application, seamlessly integrated and contextual.

“We do not believe in the concept of super apps where you just have an app that embeds a lot of independent, isolated, smaller apps. We believe that this approach is not really adding much value to customers. It provides benefits for the providers of such super apps, but for customers, that’s not so valuable. What is valuable for customers is seamlessly integrated daily life experiences blended with banking experience, providing hyper-personalised and thoughtful advice and capabilities that are solving problems for them.

“That’s where I think banking is evolving. Behind the scenes, it is and will be powered by AI engines and technological advancements. But I prefer talking about outcomes rather than how exactly we’re going to achieve them. AI will definitely accelerate the shift from static transactional banking applications to lifestyle banking applications that will not only increase the customer lifetime value for banks but also deliver greater value for bank customers.”