Today it is not unusual to come across terms like SaaS (software as a service) and BaaS (banking as a service). While software as a service has become the norm rather than the exception, BaaS still remains confusing for many people.

What is BaaS?

BaaS (Banking as a Services) takes a holistic approach to banking and allows fintech companies and other third parties to connect with banks, using APIs.

How does BaaS add value?

BaaS enables organizations to create and offer financial services, using the bank’s base infrastructure to enable improved banking services. Since the services that are part of the BaaS (Banking as a Services) portfolio are based on banking itself, they take core services and make it better.

Here are some instances where BaaS adds value:

Facilitate collections

When you are a business selling products or services to other businesses, then the collection function plays a pivotal role in ensuring that you have a healthy cash flow. When you collect funds from a customer, the usual process is to ensure that it reflects in the bank. BaaS offers you multiple ways to enhance the collection process by automating invoices, embedding payment links, sending reminders, and above all these, it also ensures that you have complete visibility over the entire process.

Enable payments

As a thriving business, it is vital to have a good working relationship with your suppliers and vendors to ensure uninterrupted supplies. One of the critical factors to this is to make payments on time. BaaS (banking as a service) makes the process of keeping track of payments and making them on time with the right approvals with complete transparency and security. BaaS also facilitates other regular payments like rent, utilities, taxes, etc., with regular reminders, automatic retrieval of invoices, and offering many options to pay the amount.

Issue cards

While banks are the core issuer of cards to customers with specific limits, BaaS provides corporates to further issue co-branded or other types of cards. As a result, companies will find it easy to empower their employees to make payments for business-related expenses.

Speed up KYC

Know your customer or KYC is an important part of the banking industry. With the use of BaaS, this process can be cut short and made more efficient and accurate. With BaaS, the process of onboarding new customers with the requisite information, which has been verified and checked becomes much quicker.

Controls and checks

BaaS also offers corporates with a platform to track and control the expenses they make on a regular basis.  Furthermore, BaaS also offers data and insights into payment and collection patterns to help you plan better. You can put controls and checks at various levels to ensure spend is warranted and as planned.

What is more, BaaS helps financial services to be delivered to the end user at a lesser cost, enables quicker launches, and improve the customer experience on the whole. The advancements in BaaS has helped a wider audience get access to financial services. Given the rising number of startups, smaller and medium businesses in our growing economy, it is critical for all businesses to have access to banking services and BaaS does just that.

Moreover, today a country like ours wants to move away from the paper-bound and physical aspect of banking and financial services to a virtual experience. BaaS has a huge role to play in this aspect by not only ensuring speed and accessibility but also ensuring security at every level.