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Finastra's America's Lending Day highlights digital progress

Monday, January 13, 2025 — 12:16:44 (EST)

London, Jan. 13, 2025—Finastra, a global provider of financial software applications, hosted its Americas Lending Day event in New York City. The event brought together industry experts and leaders from the banking, lending, trade finance, and technology sectors to discuss the latest trends, challenges, and opportunities in the digitization and automation of financial services.

Featuring keynote speeches, panel discussions with Finastra leadership and industry experts, and breakout sessions, the event highlighted pressing challenges and opportunities across commercial lending, corporate lending, and trade finance today. Key takeaways from the sessions include:

AI underpins progress and transformation – Attendees and panelists emphasized that there is significant ROI at stake with AI, making investment key. In sectors as complex as corporate lending and trade finance, AI can support tasks ranging from simple information summarization to more complex use cases like customer experience tools, process automation, and knowledge management and transfer.

Standardization is making real progress – The corporate lending sector is known to have challenges with standardization, as identifiers often vary by each supported industry. These difficulties are further amplified by complex legacy systems. However, agile and open technology solutions that embrace automation and AI are well positioned to address these historic pain points and drive greater efficiency into this space.

Customer centricity must be at the forefront of all technology transformation – Speakers and attendees discussed why innovations must solve real-world needs with the end customer in mind. Financial institutions should assess organizational readiness and customer appetite for change and proceed with any modernization project at a pace that aligns with these realities. Regular, ongoing engagement with customers is also key.

Geopolitical changes are creating uncertainty – Global unrest and the lingering effects from the COVID-19 pandemic have impacted the trade landscape with new trade corridors opening, and these disruptions could be compounded by the change in U.S. administration. As a dynamic, global industry, trade finance is shaped by constant disruption and opportunity, and the need for access to capital and liquidity persists. Innovative technology plays a critical role in enabling financial institutions to effectively navigate these shifts.

The Open Finance ecosystem is more important than ever – Amid political uncertainty, the rise of AI, limited budgets, and the ever-present need to prioritize the customer, Open Finance provides a vital solution. In trade finance, mandates to meet regulatory and compliance requirements must always take precedence, even as the desire to invest in other solution areas persists. This is where the Open Finance ecosystem can play a key role, enabling financial institutions to collaborate with fintechs and other partners in an open sandbox environment, rather than working in silos. By fostering industry-wide collaboration and embracing agility, real progress can be made in closing the trade finance gap.

The event also showcased Finastra’s latest innovations and solutions, such as Loan IQ Simplified Servicing, Loan Portal, Loan IQ Nexus, and Academy.AI. Closing out the day was a panel discussion with the leadership of Finastra’s Lending business unit, who discussed the key priorities expressed by clients and how Finastra is responding.

“We are pleased to have brought together more than 100 customers with our team members and partners for a productive day of collaboration, brainstorming, and education,” said Andrew Bateman, EVP of Lending at Finastra. “As an enabler of the Open Finance ecosystem, we see collaboration as key to the success of the corporate lending and trade finance sectors, and look forward to continuing these conversations as we solve problems and make financial services more accessible and efficient.”

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Source: Company press release.