Banking APIs are becoming a growth engine for financial institutions, but the opportunity doesn’t end with launching the connection and the demands on customer support, IT, and operations teams grow with it.
As William Trapani, Ninth Wave shared,
“No matter how big you are, you can’t train your entire staff on hundreds of applications…”It really becomes a one-off function that very few banks and wealth managers have the resources, or take the time to train tech support in.”
The challenge is no longer simply, “Can we connect?”
It’s:
- Who manages the connection when something breaks?
- Who helps a client understand why their data or transactions aren’t flowing?
- Who monitors performance, manages exceptions, and coordinates across vendors?
- Who keeps integrations secure, compliant, and operating as requirements evolve?
- Who supports new use cases without adding more operational complexity?
For many institutions, these responsibilities are landing on teams that are already stretched too thin.
When Connectivity Becomes a Client Experience
Consider commercial Open Finance. A bank may connect a client’s ERP, accounting, or treasury platform to its banking services, but the bank’s support team may not be experts in NetSuite, Workday, Yardi, or the dozens of other platforms clients use.
When something breaks, the client can get caught between the bank and the third-party provider.
And the impact goes beyond a support ticket.
When automation breaks and a client is forced back to manual processes, the value of connectivity disappears—and so can some of the stickiness that keeps that client with the bank.
The best connectivity is the connectivity the client never has to think about.
Clients Expect Partnerships, Not Products
Today’s commercial and wealth clients have increasingly complex financial ecosystems—multiple businesses, accounts, advisors, accounting systems, ERPs, and financial platforms.
They don’t want to manage the complexity themselves.
They expect their financial institution to make it work.
That means connectivity is no longer just a technology capability. It is part of the client experience and, ultimately, part of the relationship.
Managed Services: Making Complexity Invisible
Financial institutions don’t need to build every piece of connectivity expertise internally.
They need the right expertise available when and where it matters.
That’s the opportunity behind Ninth Wave Managed Services.
Ninth Wave treats connectivity support as a specialized discipline, providing operational expertise across financial institutions and hundreds of third-party platforms. Services can range from 24/7 support to higher-touch, white-glove client support, with proactive monitoring and testing designed to identify issues before they reach the client.
The objective is simple:
- Reduce the burden on internal IT and support teams
- Resolve issues faster and improve the client experience
- Increase adoption of connected services
- Support evolving Open Finance requirements
- Scale connectivity without scaling operational complexity
The institutions that win in Open Finance won’t simply be the ones with the most connections.
They’ll be the ones that can reliably manage those connections—and make the complexity invisible to the client.
That’s the next frontier of Open Banking.
That’s the opportunity behind Ninth Wave Managed Services.