NCR Voyix’s Tansill Walks the Walk on Digital ‘Everywhere’ Banking

Many companies pay lip service to their “ecosystem” as they navigate the world of digital banking solution providers and FinTech partnerships.

Five months into his tenure at NCR Voyix, President of Digital Banking Brendan Tansill is doing much more than talking the talk.

As he told Karen Webster, integrations with FinTechs and a “marketplace” approach to scalable solutions and API connectivity are giving rise to digital-first banking ecosystems, populated by products that appeal to different demographics through fine-tuned marketing efforts and a personalized approach.

“Our software development kits integrate data that maximizes the capabilities of our platform and integrates partner capabilities as tightly as possible,” embedded in NCR’s broader banking offerings, Tansill said. “We’ve spent a lot of time curating a marketplace, and we spend a lot of time talking about the concept of extensibility … We want to be a business that is easy to do business with.”

The ecosystem for digital banking can be likened to the Apple ecosystem, as watches link with MacBooks and iPhones, and apps are used across all of them, he said.

“We have this ecosystem of products, and unlocking value comes with delivering incremental capabilities and functionalities that are only available when these products are consumed in tandem,” he said.

The foundation of the ecosystem is built on driving deposit growth, and those primary accounts serve as a springboard toward getting consumers interested in add-on accounts. NCR Voyix, by way of example, has built a streamlined, unified, digital account opening tool through NCR Terafina that helps client financial institutions boost their sales conversions and cross-sell other offerings.

Amid the cross-pollination efforts, the Terafina platform “will pre-populate all the fields that the financial institution already ‘knows’” about the client, expediting application processes, Tansill said. Financial institutions “see lower abandonment rates, and as they consume more products, these customers become ‘stickier’ and even bigger sources of revenues.”

He said the impact is validated by two NCR Voyix banking clients, who told him they had won awards for “best mobile and online solutions” and had found that they were generating higher revenues per customer while attrition rates declined.

“These are all the things that you would hope to see as the management team of a financial institution,” Tansill said.

The demand from banks to become digital-first, modern operators has been reflected in NCR’s earnings results, where the segment reported a 5% rise in digital banking customers year over year to 28.5 million.

“Payments have been among the biggest ‘add ons’ that we sell in our digital banking offering,” he said.

The digital shift is critical, said Tansill, who added that smaller financial institutions — whose clients tend to skew older — need to capture momentum from younger demographics.

Right now, financial wellness is top of mind for younger consumers, which offers another avenue for financial institutions to serve the needs of existing customers and expand their reach, Tansill noted. But in doing so, the banks must have the right products spanning everything from financial planning to budgeting and credit-building.

A long-term strategy also involves giving parents apps and services that will help set up kids’ spending and savings accounts that have some measure of parental control, he said.

“We’re in the process of implementing partnerships that will enable parents to introduce their children into the banking ecosystem,” he said.

As Tansill noted to Webster, “that child is our future customer … and is the future customer of the FI. Getting them into the fold at an early age is important.”

In the meantime, younger consumers in the Generation Z and millennial demographics — the parents of those future customers — are interested in keeping track of and boosting their credit scores (marketed to financial institutions through NCR’s savvymoney solution).

Looking ahead, the company intends to launch a new user interface within the next several months. As Tansill noted, “if we can disintermediate people, replaced with a digital experience, that speaks to success.”

Also on the agenda is an exploration of how the restaurant and retail sides of NCR Voyix — which connect point-of-sale and back-office systems — and the digital banking efforts might be connected. We live in the burgeoning age of connected devices, and with the data flow across all those endpoints, retailers and banking systems can help shape loyalty offers, enable real-time payments and lower the cost of acceptance. Business banking is an area that could be a source of potential.

“These are things that we’ll continue to explore and is on the roadmap of things I’ll be digging into more in the weeks and months ahead,” Tansill said. “This is a fantastically healthy industry … and there are almost limitless possibilities.”

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