Continuous Innovation Drives Oracle’s Leadership in Global Retail Core Banking (2024)

Tushar Chitra, Vice President, Product Strategy and Marketing

Gartner placed Oracle as a leader in its Magic Quadrant report for Global Retail Core Banking in February 2022, supporting our vision of a core banking platform that drives market differentiation and customer-centricity in retail banking.

I sat down with Vikram Gupta, group vice president of banking engineering, to discuss the changing face of Oracle’s core banking portfolio. We also reflected on Oracle’s continuous innovation via agile architectural thinking and deep solution functionality, which helps deliver incremental innovation and value in core banking transformations.

Vikram highlighted how we have continuously built on our deep experience to make our core banking portfolio the strongest in terms of functionality, architecture, and success in delivering on banks’ current and future digital banking needs.

Retail core banking transformation is firmly on the agenda for all banks as they seek digital-first architecture and cloud readiness combined with deep functionality and domain expertise to ensure faster outcomes. Our leadership placement confirms that Oracle’s core banking portfolio is the leading choice for banks looking at changing their core systems for true, customer-centric retail banking.

Vikram GuptaGroup Vice President, Banking Engineering, Oracle Financial Services

Continuous innovation, commitment to customer success, and investment are the mantra that drives our focus

Oracle's Banking solution suite has a continuous product release cycle with releases once every three months. New functionality, and out-of-the-box use cases leveraging the latest technologies are delivered to customers on a regular and uninterrupted basis. As a result, banks benefit from new and incremental functionality all through the year in a timely and convenient manner.

Our strength in delivering successful outcomes for customers, on-time and on budget, is based on the partnership and consistent feedback from our customers, which has helped us develop functionality and innovate at a faster pace. We can proudly say that we are among the best in the industry for a successful delivery.

We are always agile in our architecture

We consistently leverage Oracle’s vast R&D resources, and have pioneered many architectural concepts, like parametrized modular architecture and open APIs at scale to be at the cutting edge of banking architecture. Today, the Oracle Banking solution suite is anchored on a microservices architecture designed for agility and performance. The architecture offers domain-driven design and microservices that are consumption-ready, consumable at a unit of value, and designed for the cloud or on-premise. Comprising of business components, business services, and common infrastructural services, the architecture abstracts core infrastructural concerns from application development. The architecture offers complete design, extend, build, deploy and run flexibility on the cloud or on-premise. Low code capabilities enable banks to extend the core functionality quickly or completely build new feature sets to meet rapidly evolving business requirements while minimizing complexity and costs. An extensive portfolio of pre-integrated domain-driven solution components and microservices span core banking operations, digital workflows, and experience layers of the banking technology stack. The architecture enables continuous upgrades, hyper scalability, streamlined interoperability, 24/7 availability, powerful performance, and competitive total cost of ownership.

Banking on tomorrow, our core banking is ready to help banks build open, innovative ecosystems

Oracle helps banks rewire systems to grant APIs a central role, enabling quick leverage and profitability from the API Economy. 1800+ Open APIs help augment interoperability and integration with third-party firms and ecosystems. Oracle enables end-to-end management of APIs and their externalization with the right operational and financial controls, empowering banks to quickly partner, embed products and services in extended value chains, and participate in or create broader ecosystems. In addition, the Oracle ecosystem is constantly enriched through collaboration with ecosystem partners like fintechs and startups in identity verification, AI, business spend management, payment workflows, credit scoring, personal financial management, account receivables, and API marketplaces. Ecosystem partners collaborate with Oracle and its customers to discover APIs and services and build extensive and innovative apps and offerings that complement Oracle's banking solutions or banks' financial services offerings.

We enable banks to build an experience-centric approach—from inside out

Oracle offers persona-driven experiences empowering a distributed banking workforce of relationship managers, tellers, customer support executives, operations managers, etc., with customized experiences that offer relevant insights, tools, and process automation. Oracle helps banks drive a shift from transactional interactions to relationship-based engagement at every customer touchpoint. Machine learning capabilities provide predictions and deep insights that help bankers better understand customers and offer them more relevant products, while optimizing branch operations to improve customer service. Intelligent credit decisioning helps simplify and automate credit assessments and loan pricing. Solutions that employ natural language processing, such as chatbots, help bankers improve efficiency and elevate the customer experience at scale. Finally, informing operations with real-time data ensures that experiences are simple, fast, and add value.

We continue to be a preferred choice for next evolution banking for a broad spectrum of customers. Over 700 financial institutions across 150+ countries of different types like universal banks, credit unions, challenger banks, cooperative banks, Islamic banks, microfinance institutions, central banks, and development finance institutions have chosen Oracle for core banking. Two digital challengers and market innovators who have been in the press of late are setting new benchmarks powered by Oracle.

• W1TTY uses Oracle’s Banking suite for hyper-personalized yet highly relevant financial services. W1TTY aims to put customers in charge of their finances by delivering hyper-personalized services at transparent rates. Equipped with payments, a digital core, microservices, comprehensive open API set, and cloud-ready architecture, Oracle FLEXCUBE helps WITTY provide digital services with native apps in a fully mobile-driven experience to customers in just 13 months. Launching in the fall of 2021, W1TTY will expand its suite of services, flexibility, and scalability with the latest cloud technology. 'The role of financial services in the next era is to operate on a more personal level,' Ammar Kutait, Founder of W1TTY, explains. 'You have to tailor each offering based on your customer's current financial situation, life circ*mstances, and goals.' In Oracle FLEXCUBE, it found a truly scalable solution that will serve its global ambitions for years to come.
• Airtel, one of the largest telecom providers globally, leveraged Oracle FLEXCUBE to launch a pure-play digital payment bank in India and Nigeria. Oracle FLEXCUBE enables Airtel to add millions of banking customers month-on-month. Customers can open deposit accounts in a matter of minutes. Oracle FLEXCUBE helps Airtel's Payments Bank run on digital technologies engineered for mobile banking supporting digital banking operations and transactions on a vast scale. Airtel can also seamlessly leverage a large partner ecosystem to deliver full-fledged banking services such as loans and lines of credit to its customers.

At Oracle Financial Services, we provide banks with a truly digital native core banking solution that provides critical capabilities for the next evolution of retail banks, from core operations to flexible workflows and digital experiences. It enables digital, agile, innovative, and open banking while significantly optimizing operating costs.

Explore Oracle Core Banking Solutions