Modyo Transforms the Financial Services Industry with DXP

By Natalie Evans

November 30, 2018

API, Cloud, CMS, content management, Content Management System, Digital Transformation, DXP, Enterprise Content Management, Financial Services, Headless CMS, Modyo

There has been a lot of noise in the past recent years about digital transformation and especially in the financial service sector. According to a Liferay report “banking leaders consider 49% consider their strategy halfway completed, 37% of financial institutions are beginning to roll out their strategy and only 13% of respondents report completing (or being close to completing) their digital transformation strategy.” While banks are committed to the whole customer experience journey. Consumers today are increasingly making their banking decision based on ease of use on how they interact with their financial institutions. With this fierce competition around customer experience and transformation banks, today need to step it up, 56% of respondents in the survey claim access to IT resources as an obstacle.

So, let me introduce to you Modyo, the company that is guiding the financial institutions through digital transformation. In 2007, Modyo was founded in Santiago, Chile by a group of technology loving entrepreneurs. I was very fortunate to get into touch with Mark Bonnell, CEO of Modyo to gain his insight into the company.

For our readers that aren’t familiar with Modyo, could you tell all little about your company and who your customers are?

"Modyo builds digital experience software for web and mobile sites & portals of large organizations and financial institutions that want to combine CMS functionality, including headless CMS functionality, with Key Front End Development to connect widgets to APIs. The platform works both in the Cloud and On-Premise. We're technology partners with AWS, and we have an international team with Canadians, Americans, French, Germans, Chileans, Colombians to name a few nationalities.

We're lucky to have early investors in Modyo that include the Chairman of Jetblue airlines, one of the Directors of Paypal, friends who believed in us and the founders. We reached profitability some years ago, so we've been growing with our clients. We love our clients like Santander Bank, Bci Bank (which is buying banks in Florida), Cinemark International to mention a few clients."

With so many, DXP’s out there why did you see the need to create your own and what makes your software stand out above the rest?

"We built Modyo to help accelerate digital transformation in web and mobile channels where our customers essentially want to do very strategic things with their sites, portals, and apps. To do these strategic things requires a powerful, streamlined front end development environment to connect to APIs and build digital experiences fast through widgets (front-end) and not portlets (heavy back-end). They also require content management and customer management in the digital channel where Modyo has both. To this end, we have a widget builder where you build your library of digital experiences in the cloud that you can then deploy in different sites. We have an easy way to do authentication and build customer profiles on the fly to then target functionality and content.

Why we're winning customers:

• You can build things fast and address compliance, governance, and security. 

• Front End Developers and Software architects love our widget builder, template structure, drag and drop layouts.

• Software architects really like our product scope to solve technology governance and accelerated time to market.

• Non-technical users can get things done fast.

• The intersection between strategic front-end development, digital channels, content management, and customer management has been rethought in Modyo.

• Strong underlying technology stack that meets the compliance issues of financial institutions.

• We have 3 deployment models, (SaaS - Multi Tenant, Private Cloud - Single Tenant, On Premise)

• Fair price."

What would you say has been some of the contributions that have landed Modyo where it is today?

• "We tried to listen carefully to recurring pain points of large organizations in how they viewed their digital channels and what they wanted to do with digital transformation initiatives. (Essentially the channel is core in the formula.)

• Our core team has plenty of experience and the trust of great clients.

• We started at the end of the world in Chile with great international people contributing. Today we're building a global software company from Latin America.

• We didn't rush and try to scale without first thinking through our product scope.

• Once we started winning banking clients it strengthened our capacity to grow faster with a strong base."

How do you see the technology evolving around driving Digital Transformation Strategy for Exceptional Customer Experience in the coming years? 

• "We believe that the scope of the digital experience platforms are going to continue to change. No one platform can do everything well.

• Building exceptional customer experiences is an exercise in understanding the most important customer needs and then putting the architecture, integration, and execution in place to get things done quickly, efficiently and iteratively so you can continue to fundamentally improve customer experiences across devices. 

• We're going to focus on improving our capacity to streamline building digital experiences that make it easy to integrate to core systems."

What are some of the challenges the financial industry is facing when they are selecting the appropriate CMS?

• "The CMS is only one part of the equation. In the case of the financial services industry, they want to make sure that security, governance, and compliance works in the best way possible. ADA and GDPR are additional issues that impact digital channels and the CMS selected. 

• Headless Content Management to put content anywhere is important. 

• Exploring the right architecture for the digital experience is key. In Modyo you can manage both public and private-transactional channels in one platform because we spent a lot of time early on in the company thinking about architecture and use cases where you really want to onboard customers through the public site, but then have them get things done and transact as quickly as possible.

• Customer profiling from core business systems that then influence the content that is shown is another relevant issue. 

• All the different Google integrations are important for the CMS. We tried to make Modyo as Google friendly as possible with Google Tag Manager, Google Analytics, Google Optimize, Google Adwords etc... as well as other platforms that drive traffic to a banks digital channels."

Where do you see your company’s growth/focus in the next 3-5 years?

• "We're going to expand with our clients in digital channels for Financial Services launching different types of financial services solutions.

• We're going to leverage our technology partnership with Amazon Web Services to grow faster with AWS.

• We're going to continue to hire great people that accelerate our growth in the U.S., Canada and Europe. We just hired an Ex-Leader of Liferay as our Chief Revenue Officer who was working with large global clients the past few years."

Ending Notes

With my short interaction with Modyo while researching them, you can definitely see the passion that they have for what they do, this drive has given them a foothold in the fintech industry.

Content security is critical in the financial services industry, as companies routinely handle sensitive information, being able to stay on top and deliver in a timely fashion has always come into play. Modyo platform has made it reasonably simple for creating, maintaining and executing a system while still maintaining the stringent laws in the banking industry. 

It’s definitely been a year of growth for Modyo, and they have come out with several more features to their platform. If you are interested in learning more about Modyo Platform along with its features be sure to check here.

 

Natalie Evans

Natalie Evans has over 16-years in the tech industry and currently works as the event coordinator and tech reporter for CMS-Connected, keeping up-to-date on what's happening in and around the Content Management industry.