Teknospire Brings Digitization, Mobile Payments-Style Options to Small Banks

While we’ve heard quite a bit about digital bank opportunities from major banks like Bank of America, we haven’t heard much of anything out of the smaller banks out there. With good reason; most of the smaller banks simply don’t have the resources to fully engage in such practices. However, a new tool from Teknospire may be able to change that by offering many of the tools in a simple, almost white-label basis.

Known as a “bank-in-a-box” solution, small banks and similar institutions can build themselves the full range of digital tools. Already, Teknospire has had a hand in re-engineering rural banks throughout India, so if it were to expand from there, it would likely meet with some success. So far, it’s actually landed 10 new banks in Africa and Asia since its launch, as well as two in India, where Teknospire is headquartered.

The company’s founder, Vishal Gupta, got his start in mobile payments, complete with a salary automation platform that sold in Zimbabwe, geared mainly toward government jobs in the country. Using a design that focused on application programming interfaces (APIs), the end result easily connected to current systems and enterprise resource planning (ERP) tools. That laid the groundwork for the currently-offered banking tool, one that has the very real potential to open up digital operations everywhere. Zambia’s Tafika, for example, put the system to work to completely shut down every physical branch and ATM it offered, becoming 100 percent digital.

That may not be a great move everywhere, of course, especially given how various generations feel about having a physical branch available. It’s not just the oldsters, either; while boomers certainly want a branch around, and Gen X feels much the same way, there are indications that Gen Z is starting to prefer the notion of a physical bank branch as well. The millennials are increasingly an aberration in demography; what they want is pretty much unique to them, with some intersection with other generations.

Sure, the idea of having mobile options is a great one. Teknospire has opened up the floor to bring mobile options to more banks more readily, and that’s going to improve the overall customer experience quite nicely.