Too many cooks?

Thanks for dropping by my kitchen again – much appreciated. Being the Caribbean partner in Megasol, I am known for my curry recipes. I typically make enough for three days because curry matures nicely and tastes better over those additional days.

My recent evening task has been to bring together family recipes going back to the late 1800’s and written in either Portuguese or English. My grandmother hailed from Madeira and wrote all of her early recipes in Portuguese. The later ones were in the English of British Guiana. But the nice thing about recipes is that they can be translated so that everyone can work with them. And so, we have recipes such as Toucinho do Céu (Heavenly Bacon) and Bolo de Mel (Honey Cake) and Broas de Amêndoa (Almond Bread) all available in English for our worldwide family.

Now, like my turtle story, this is analagous!. While the language of banking tends to be English, the engines of banking – the software applications – need to reflect local language preferences at work. Our clients, like my family, are spread across the world. Their customers may or may not speak English. Their staff may or may not speak English. For this reason, we have been hard at work analysing the best way forward for our clients insofar as language support is concerned. Let me take you through the process.

The organisation which is best equipped to design an app for online banking is the one which serves the market. Let me put that another way – if you are a bank, a lender or a payment provider, then you know the unique needs of your clients in your specific markets. You know your products and you have definite ideas on branding and appearance.

We at Megasol do not have those insights. We can and do provide you with an amazingly flexible back-office system. And over the last couple of months, we have added languages – French, Italian, Portuguese, Spanish, Simplified Chinese – to the Corniche back-office alonside the standard English and Swedish. We have taken it further – the language elements also cover our Corniche BOAPI  – the back-office API. You can extend the Corniche back-office or integrate it with other applications in any of these languages.

Now let’s be frank – one size does not fit all! Our translations will do the job in your back-office, but not for your customers. For them you need the pizazz of branding, product-relevance and localised language. This is where our most important decision was made – leave the organisation to create its own interface to its clients using Corniche CUAPI – you develop or already have developed your own online banking, online lending or payments portal. When you integrate with Corniche, our API lets you create new clients and accounts, create transaction, manage loans and payments and so on. And the API offers all of the flexibility of the Corniche banking system so that all of your product nuances can be met.

Yes, we will produce a smartphone capable online banking app at some time in the future – in the same way that we currently support the CornicheNet browser-based online banking service – and it is very good. But it is a plain vanilla solution – just a tad neutral even if it is highly efficient. It will provide access to statements, to managing generic bank accounts such as current, savings, loans and term deposits, and it will enable transfers and payments – all good plain vanilla banking. It will, however, miss out on your flavouring – the bright colours of cumin and carrots, the eye-catching sprinkles of red, yellow and green peppers, the welcome solidity of heavy cream. And it will miss out on those personal touches in presentation – the celery and lettuce leaves acting as a picture frame, the garnish of chopped parsley, all on a plate carefully chosen to present an appetising feast, and with cutlery designed to help consumption.

Let me finish with one final analogy. You can consider our Corniche back-office app to be the equivalent of access to the fridge, the freezer and the rest of our banking kitchen for storage and retrieval purposes, to manage supplies, to be ready to cook for our guests.

But you are the Chef – you must come up with the recipe – with the wholesome meal – for your guests – it is your restaurant!

The multi-language Corniche API permits you to design that meal with all of those personal nuances required for your customers by developing your own online banking front-end which feeds both your clients and Corniche in a most satisfying way. Enjoy!