Here’s to a branded Card App in 24 hours 🥂
In this article, we’ll introduce a way for you as a Card Program Manager (BaaS/CaaS) to reach more scalability, lower the lead time of clients reaching market, growing margins and volumes faster by offering a ready-to-market digital card application in only 24 hours.
Good-bye to high setup cost and farewell to misaligned fee structures
The rise of the Banking-as-a-Service (BaaS) industry has not gone unnoticed by anyone within the financial service industry and by now it has almost been a decade since the first movers entered the space. The BaaS players have become more mature and many lessons have been learned. The BaaS business and pricing model is not an exception and if you’re a C-level at one, you’ve probably figured out by now that clients do not like high up-front setup costs and high monthly license fees nor an unpredictable pricing on API calls that could potentially blow up to the roof without the client’s revenue catching up simultaneously. Like with all infrastructure, to justify high development cost, you need to find a way to reach scalability and high volumes to get your return on investment. Unfortunately, for some BaaS companies, this is not achieved — yet. Currently being punished by investors who flee to more proven business models, these companies will have to show healthier growth key figures.
With a volume based pricing structure… focus on volume.
Hoorey! Your sales team just reached a new deal with an exciting well funded client with a promising go-to-market strategy and a compelling value proposition. After a long and daunting sale process and many dating and flirting calls followed by more serious DD calls on both sides, you finally reach an agreement. Your team is quick to get grounded when realizing your new client is at square one with its actual consumer product and there will be at least 12 months until you see any real end-users signing up to the service. Deploying a new banking service is hard, it has been in the past and it will be in the near future. When you leave it to your clients to handle the end-application buildout by offering little to no support, you are also signing up for a potential failure of your client which is a failed opportunity for your company as well.
How hard can it be to build an in-house card wallet?
It’s just an app, how hard can it be? Those who’ve tried know, by now, that in-house wallet app buildout is quite hard, while operating it long-term is even harder. During the rise of BaaS companies over recent years, needs have evolved substantially. Before, companies like Monzo, Revolut, N26 and others entering financial services would raise double-digit $millions to start operation and they’d hire a dev team counting 100+ people, working on the company’s app/wallet product. Now, we’re seeing companies that enter financial services are becoming more diverse, ranging from telcos, retailers, video game developers and even amusement parks & resorts. These companies have low appetite for long development time and high starting capital. Instead, they want a ready to-market solution that can be tailored to meet their business goals quickly and effectively.
Whether a company is starting its financial service journey or an established one launching a new wallet service, the road to reach the goal is bumpy. The UX/UI design, QA, data handling, pen testing , cloud hosting & disaster recovery plan are just examples of things needed to be carefully thought of before even starting. Launching a new wallet service can easily take 18–24 months and no, it won’t necessarily go faster by adding more resources on the project — it can even go slower.
Why BaaS companies neglect Front-End
BaaS digital wallet offerings (Front-End) are in most cases limited and even worse, not present at all. It’s not a secret that front-end offerings have not been a top priority for companies providing banking infrastructure. To me, the reason are obvious:
- Front-end is hard to standardize. Customers have various wishes and demands that can be hard to cover at scale. We know because we’ve experienced it.
- It’s hard to operate and maintain. Finding the balance between easy-to-use and ability to customise is hard to get right. Keeping the customers happy long term is challenging.
- Trends are constantly changing. Anyone who looks back at app screenshots from 2016 must agree. It has only been a few years but the UI/UX changes fast and new design trends are replacing old ones every year.
The Memento Wallet Platform has been devoted to solve these challenges and many more by providing anyone a digital wallet in a SaaS model.
Get your clients a digital wallet in their own brand within 24 hours.
How about doing things smarter? More lean and less capital intensive and risk free? How about providing your clients their own branded wallet into their own hands within 24 hours? And having all questions around data handling, security, QA, hosting and integration capabilities easily answered at first meeting?
Did you know that simply evaluating and comparing BaaS providers to work with can take clients up to 6–9 months? Make sure you make your potential client’s life easier. Post-setup with Memento, they could have everything they need to know about their own branded wallet, both technically and operationally within 24 hours of the initial demo call. They will get it in their hands, functional and working almost immediately. This would not be possible without Memento’s underlying wallet infrastructure, where business and project logic are embedded in our API and SDK’s, ensuring quick buildout time but also providing great flexibility of how the final outcome looks/feels.
The Memento Card wallet includes the most common functionality you’d expect from a premium wallet application, such as:
- Seamless customer onboarding with embedded KYC process
- Card management including see PIN, Top up and freeze/unfreeze card
- Transaction overview and detailed view along with filters and transaction search
- Settings, including user profile, resetting PIN and security controls
- Light and Dark mode support
- and more…
The Memento App SDK is designed by developers for developers
We did not want to create just another template app which forces you into one direction. There are plenty of those on the market. We think it differently, so with Memento SDK you can customise the app easily, adding custom colours, fonts and translations to it. You can even write your own custom screens on the side and easily add on to our provided feature set.
It has always been an important requirement to have clients extend the product in the direction they like to go, so adding new components and screens is not only possible, it’s encouraged.
Don’t worry, we integrate to your API’s, not the other way around.
I hope you’re thinking this is cool and something you’d like to offer to your card issuing clients. But you also know your tech team is awfully busy and you think it will be too complicated? Don’t worry, Memento is designed to make this easy — we simply integrate to your platform and pull the data from your end to make the wallet demonstrate your capabilities to your clients. We partner with your sales team to make demo-calls and wallet hand-out simple — in a few weeks you’ll be servicing your clients not only with a great branded card but a full digital card wallet experience.
Let’s talk!
If you’re a BaaS/CaaS provider without the ability to support your clients sufficiently with sustainable and lean front-end wallet service, do not hesitate to reach out to our team and discuss how we could change that for everyone’s benefit. Memento is a modular card application UI/UX layer which means that without the underlying infrastructure of a BaaS/CaaS partner, our digital wallets will not show any transactions, they will not move any money or show any balance. Thus, a strong and mutually beneficial relationship with BaaS/CaaS providers is our core goal. That’s why we do everything in our power to design our platform and operations to add the most value to our partners and at the same time keep things as simple as possible.
Also if you’re planning to launch your own digital wallet and want to get introduced to our pre-integrated BaaS partners, do not hesitate to reach out through our contact form at www.mementopayments.com
