Cloud-based financial software provider nCino is taking inspiration from Uber to improve on appointments for meetings with bankers.
Uber, the world’s most valuable startup, is known for its ease of use. Users pull up the app, request a car, and are given information on when to expect the vehicle and how much it should cost. When the ride is over, users simply exit the vehicle.
This ease of use is what nCino hopes to achieve with a new feature it is developing for its “bank operating system.” CEO Pierre Naudé told Bank Innovation that nCino encourages employee creativity, and that an individual in the marketing department developed the idea for the feature on his own.
There is no set launch date for rolling out the feature. nCino’s product, built on the Salesforce platform, is updated regularly and pushed out to clients from the company’s headquarters in Wilmington, N.C.
“I walked in one morning and he said, Here, I’ve got to show you something,” Naudé recalled. The feature, which he suggested could be offered first to a bank’s top-tier business clients, pulls up a map showing available bankers near the business. The business requests a meeting, and at the appointed time, a banker armed with a tablet shows up to talk.
Appointments are hot in banking. Wells Fargo has introduced an appointment-scheduling feature for its branches, as have Regions and others. But nCino’s service takes this a step further. It is designed for corporate customers, who are more used to receiving visits from bankers, but beyond that, it delivers a service bankers are familiar with as consumers and brings it into a banking context.
The service is part of nCino’s concept of “banking on demand,” to complement the On-Demand Economy exemplified by Uber. nCino refers to its SaaS product — a service layer that works alongside a bank’s transactional core to give a more comprehensive view of the customer — as a bank operating system. The transactional core, in CEO Naudé’s language, is an accounting system.
The next few months could be exciting ones for nCino. The company told Bank Innovation it expects to sign a Top 10 bank in the next few months, and a Top 20 bank not long after that.
The sweet spot for nCino has traditionally been banks between $300 million and $10 billion in assets. Is Naudé apprehensive about how his product might scale at an institution much larger than that?
“Not at all, no. I’m excited,” he said.