Benefits of Storyblok for Finance & Banking

Current market conditions and trends indicate that going headless may be necessary for digital platforms to follow the technology development. Does this apply to every industry? Everyone should carefully analyze the issue of choosing the right software for their business individually, but one thing is certain: The more technologically advanced the services are, the more modern the entire tech architecture should be. Does this mean finance and banking businesses should be powered by a headless CMS? Let’s dive into all the industry’s nuances, requirements, and challenges to find it out.

The finance industry is an ever-growing and ever-changing sector with high compliance standards for both customers and businesses. To stay one step ahead of the competition, financial entities need to constantly ensure that their websites and the information presented on them is relevant and up-to-date. To live up to this challenge, it’s imperative to provide an efficient and streamlined way to build and deliver accurate digital experiences, taking into account two aspects: Technology architecture and developer possibilities, as well as content creation and editing capabilities. The characteristics of financial sector websites are that they often have complex structures, intricate technological solutions, and require frequent updates. Additionally, they must be above average in terms of security, reliability, and infallibility when it comes to website’s maintenance and data integrity. One also cannot forget about the aspect of website speed, which translates into the smoothness of transactions and updating possibilities. In order to understand how these requirements can be met by a headless CMS implementation and how it can be done by opting for Storyblok, we invite you to break down these challenges step by step.

Section titled Multitasking financial framework of your choice Multitasking financial framework of your choice

Specific finance & banking sector requirements create a big demand for equally specific and advanced technology stack. With Storyblok you and your clients can benefit from a wide range of technology choices, which contribute to streamlining and automating operational processes, increase a platform’s efficiency, and more importantly, lower operational costs. How else can your projects benefit by leveraging Storyblok’s technology landscape?

Our experience in building projects with our partners showed us the following:

• Faster financial data processing
• Security and compliance improvement
• Increase in speed of analysis and reporting
• Risk reduction

Let’s take a closer look at these aspects. Professionally adjusted frameworks must be able to manage transactions and large amounts of data securely and quickly. Additionally, one should not forget about handling mentioned operations simultaneously, which emerges the need for uninterrupted data interactions. Going forward, the success of a platform in the financial industry is largely based on reporting and analysis, which in turn, contributes to lowering the risk of data incompatibility and occurring bugs. Looking at what frameworks were chosen by our partners to build infallible financial platforms with Storyblok, the most common choices were Next.js, Nuxt.js, and Vue.js. Storyblok is also fully compliant with other framework vendors like gatsby.js, Node.js, react.js, and more. Which of these frameworks is the best choice? With Storyblok, it can be chosen freely, based on a project’s specific requirements. Technology stack interchangeability and releasing development teams from backend conventions, turned out to be one of the main reasons why finance and banking entities decided to go for Storyblok. This wouldn't be possible if it weren't for Storyblok’s headless approach and that’s why we're happy to help you work with whatever amazing technologies you want.

Section titled Building trust with unfailable payment solutions on Storyblok Building trust with unfailable payment solutions on Storyblok

Integration that most quickly comes to mind when thinking about the financial and banking sector is a payment solution. It plays a major role in the industry as a well-tailored payment integration is supposed to provide a high security level in terms of funds availability and data, guarantees the fraudulent transactions risk reduction, and ensures reliable, fast, and convenient payment experience for a company’s customers. Conversations with our partners showed us that flexibility in payment options and preferred payment method choices can, in essence, be an overwhelming factor when choosing a financial institution. Furthermore, payment integration is also indispensable for meeting regulatory compliance requirements for payments processed in different countries at the same time. It’s important to be able to exclude useful reporting and analysis in order to seamlessly undergo auditing and controlling processes. Reports are also useful when providing multidimensional insights into customers spending tendencies and habits.

Finally, a perfect payment system should assure uncompromised data privacy, especially in the case of banking transactions, investments, or the more and more popular cryptocurrency trading and transactions. To cope with all these complex procedures, our goal is to allow you and your finance clients to freely choose and integrate a payment system that complies with all the entity’s individual requirements. We love seeing how our partners help their clients leverage the power of Storyblok’s headless possibilities as it allows them to freely choose the most suitable payment solution for their project.

A well-tailored payment integration in the case of finance and banking platforms also lets clients buy products and services directly on a website, without any additional eCommerce integration.

Looking at what our partners and clients did, leveraging the power of headless API-first approach opens possibilities to implement payment solutions such as Adyen, Stripe or other country/market-specific entity, which ensures that such an important aspect as payment is delegated to an experienced and specialized vendor. This, in turn, enables companies to distinguish their solutions and drive conversions.

Section titled Hosting: Let’s prove together that your website is trustworthy Hosting: Let’s prove together that your website is trustworthy

A future-proof technology stack also means opting for the best possible hosting provider, which is a matter of responsibility for a finance/ banking entity. Apart from the obvious aspects such as finance and banking platforms’ data security and cyber attack protection, it also makes a website constantly available, even in case of peak periods, which is particularly applicable in the financial industry. Finally, the perfect hosting vendor should be able to constantly deliver the highest quality support to ensure the platform is running smoothly and optimally.

How do we help to do so at Storyblok?

Our partners know from experience, that in terms of data security, there are no compromises for us. What does this mean? We adhere to the principle of 'safety first' and this is achieved by the top-class hosting providers implementation. We closely cooperate with Amazon AWS, which we also recommend to any finance and banking institutions and companies. AWS provides low-cost and flexible solutions to host and deliver websites and applications. When it comes to finance projects built with Storyblok, we can confidently say that most companies have chosen Amazon AWS as their hosting provider.

The list of our partnering technologies within our Technology Ecosystem also includes such suppliers as Vercel and Netlify - feel free to learn more here about our hosting and deployment partners.

In terms of security, it’s definitely worth mentioning that Storyblok is ISO27001 certified, making it one of the most secure, enterprise-grade CMS available on the market. This recognizes that all our products, operations, support processes, and data storage protocols meet the highest international security standards.

If you’d like to find out even more about leveraging Storyblok’s hosting possibilities and about secure data storage, don’t hesitate to read this article.

Section titled Know who your finance clients are and what they are looking for Know who your finance clients are and what they are looking for

A great part of finance and banking operations are often new client acquisitions, who are a very specific target group: They know what they are looking for on a finance-related website and most probably, already have a decent knowledge of financial topics. That’s why they will be looking for the most accurate and well-structured information, which will give them the opportunity to leverage a website’s full potential and achieve their goals. To remain competitive in this field, it is very useful to implement a robust search integration, which will make it easier for demanding users to find exactly what they are looking for, and thus, more personalized content, higher customer retention, and increased retail sales.

Projects that we had the opportunity to co-create showed us that our integration with Algolia perfectly meets these requirements. Thanks to the reliable API approach and the fact that the data is stored in Algolia, it allows developers to build streamlined and customized search experiences. It enables users to receive their search queries in milliseconds, has a high typo-tolerance, and provides you with useful analytics. Our partners and their clients really love it. Actually, don’t take our word for it: we use it ourselves on our search page, too! Additionally, feel free to check out how to integrate Algolia with your Headless CMS as well as our Algolia Partner Listing page.

Section titled Meet your audience everywhere they want to handle their finances Meet your audience everywhere they want to handle their finances

Are finance and banking services only a matter of websites? Obviously not nowadays, and that also can be covered by leveraging Storyblok’s omnichannel approach. It allows clients to consistently experience needed finance services across all possible touchpoints. Leveraging an omnichannel headless approach also means that such aspects as security, convenience, and speed of finance services are provided on the same level when moving between used channels. This, in turn, results in customer loyalty and satisfaction increase, improved customer service and communication, and higher customer satisfaction. Needless to say that such improvements will for sure be positive for a financial entity which can count on increased revenue and sales. This can be applicable in cases of mobile banking and loans applications, mobile trading hubs or so popular today, contactless transactions. Finally, one cannot forget about the dynamically developing Artificial Intelligence (AI) such as Alexa and Siri voice technologies or AR/VR that combines the real world and computer-generated content.

It all points to the fact that, especially today, omnichannel presence is a must when it comes to increasing client satisfaction for banks and other financial companies. Storyblok guarantees omnichannel solutions thanks to its API-first approach, which assures a coherent overview on content published on all emerging devices, making the financial entities’ user experience consistent within all possible touchpoints.

Finally, one cannot forget about the dynamically developing Artificial Intelligence (AI) such as Alexa and Siri voice technologies or AR/VR that combines the real world and computer-generated content.

Section titled Make financial services easy again with Storyblok Make financial services easy again with Storyblok

Financial and banking issues are complicated enough to make them even more difficult with convoluted descriptions or unintuitive UX. A platform's level of comprehensibility may determine whether a person stays on your website at all and for how long. As an example from the finance world, let's think of helping customers bypass complicated banking procedures or being able to trade or take out a loan with a few clicks. Your goal in this area is to create a platform that is intuitive, transparent, easy to use and navigate. How to then show financial topics as something simple? At Storyblok, we have a whole range of tools and ways to do it. We have analyzed projects from the banking and finance industry created with our partners to check what help them at most:

• Content structuring and modeling is possible thanks to Storyblok’s component-based approach. The components are reusable, nestable, and can be saved and applied at any time.
• It’s possible to define customized components and blocks as well as reuse the whole created structures. This makes it possible to create a website’s component-based design, which assumes building websites based on already-made components.
• Visual Editor was announced as the deciding factor in the selection of a new CMS in most financial projects made with Storyblok. Marketers and content creators appreciated the live preview option, the possibility of creating content in real-time, visual AB testing, and the ability to present finance-related graphics in a simple and accessible way. All this gave marketers a fully powerful editing experience.
• Storyblok’s internal DAM and external DAM integrations enable it to host and manage numerous multimedia (graphics, videos, animations) with a short load time. This can also be applicable in creating learning hubs where companies can educate clients in the field of financial knowledge.
• Flexibility in data creation and editing also has a big impact on SEO performance. Storyblok enables brands to respond to current market conditions and trends by adjusting SEO changes and edits quickly, which increases a platform’s SEO rankings and accessibility. The possibility of doing quick changes on a website allows finance and banking companies to stay ahead of the competition.

Section titled Trust us and create trustworthy finance & banking digital platforms Trust us and create trustworthy finance & banking digital platforms

Regardless of whether a company’s name is already well established or is at the stage of development, operating in the financial sector entails consolidating its position as a trustworthy and secure services provider. We’re happy to have helped numerous finance and banking-related businesses create truly multidimensional and multidisciplinary user experiences, making finance services secure, reliable, and easy for a large cross-section of consumers. We are looking forward to the next fascinating projects in which we could together unlock the endless power of finance and banking platforms!

Not sure how to choose the perfect tech stack for your finance-related clients or you have questions regarding Storyblok? Feel free to contact our Storyblok Support Team or reach out to our Partner Team directly. Also, check out our Technology Partner Listing page within our Technology Ecosystem to learn more about leveraging Storyblok’s technology potential.