By Johnny Ola, Managing Director of Q2 Innovation Studio at Q2
A while back, Q2 recognized that the traditional financial institution/fintech integration and collaboration model was broken.
And, thus, Q2 Innovation Studio was born.
When we launched Q2 Innovation Studio last summer, we wanted to disrupt the market and provide a unique combination of capabilities that other vendors are not offering. Our goal was to help financial institutions (FIs) provide best-in-class financial experiences for consumers and businesses by providing a portfolio of technologies and programs that FIs and our fintech partners can leverage to design, develop and distribute innovative digital banking products, services and features. That goal has been realized far beyond our expectations, and a year on, the momentum continues to build.
Over the last year, we’ve seen a huge spike in usage and adoption. Q2 currently has 450 banks and credit unions and approximately 20 million end users on the digital banking platform. Already, over half of our FIs are leveraging the Innovation Studio. In addition, we have more than 85 fintech partners creating a wealth of solutions that are fast and easy for companies to adopt.
We all know that the world has entered a new frontier in financial services, with FIs, fintechs and brands converging to create unique products and distribute them in new ways. Q2 Innovation Studio is leading the way in embedded fintech options inside of digital banking. Through the Q2 Marketplace and Partner Accelerator programs, FIs can now select and deploy pre-integrated apps much more quickly, without investing in expensive development and integration resources.
Q2 Innovation Studio provides a broad range of options FIs can personalize and pass on to their customers. They can build unique features and capabilities on top of the platform, leveraging our software development kit (SDK) and suite of APIs. It’s like getting a custom-designed platform without the cost or complication.
We’ve made flexibility and personalization a priority. The result? Our customers can do so much more with this tool because it maximizes usefulness and efficiency without requiring a technical genius. FIs have the ability to choose between their team using the platform to create the unique solutions they want to offer their customers and/or working with our certified partners who know our platform and SDK extremely well.
For example, FIs can create everything necessary to provide a new product or service using the same tools we use at Q2 — but they don't have to worry about all the technology underneath. They can leverage our SDK to accomplish what they're trying to do, whether that’s adding new features or services or creating a unique integration. They can create their own look and feel so the branding stays consistent, and then roll it out to their customers on their desktop and mobile devices.
Finding Solutions With Q2 Partners
Lately, we’ve been seeing a lot of enthusiasm around companies choosing pre-integrated solutions from fintechs and other partners we're working with.
The Q2 Marketplace is unique in the industry as an app store for end users of FIs, where these partner apps can be purchased (or some apps are pay as you go transactional apps) and are deployed immediately for consumer and SMB customers. FIs choose which aApps they want to include in their version of the marketplace and make available to their end users. These include apps such as payment processing, international wires, credit reporting, wealth management, financial education, business expense and employee time tracking, automated accounting, HR/payroll and much more.
Our Partner Accelerator program contains other pre-integrated solutions that FIs purchase from our partners to help improve back-office operations, analytics, customer service, marketing and much more.
It's all pre-integrated for quick deployment, so it saves a huge amount of time and money, and we’re continually adding partners to provide more pre-integrated solutions. In fact, we’ve had a 400% YOY increase in fintech partnerships and interest keeps growing. We have over 200 in our pipeline, and we don’t expect that to slow down.
Bringing Financial Technology Forward
For those bringing tech solutions to the financial world, Q2 Innovation Studio is the perfect network allowing them to seamlessly and quickly plug in solutions inside of digital banking and roll them out to customers. Innovation Studio powers the technology, development platform and back-end integrations. This frees up our partners to build one integration, leveraging our SDK without having to worry about the technical differences from FI to FI.
Our go-to market programs enable them to see their sales velocity increase while minimizing the cost of customer acquisition. Q2 Innovation Studio has everything partners need, including support for marketing and sales. This allows them to get the focus back to doing what they do best: innovating and improving their unique, cutting-edge solutions for the FIs and end users who need them.
And that makes the financial experience, end-to-end, better for everyone. Innovative companies have a platform that makes it easy to share their solutions. FIs have a streamlined way to find and package the best services and products for their customers. And end users benefit from more efficient ways to solve problems and manage money.
We’re proud that Q2 Innovation Studio is making these changes possible — and we’re looking forward to seeing what we disrupt next.
To learn more about Q2 Innovation Studio, click here.