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A business’s need to build and maintain customer relationships far predates the cloud or the internet. It even predates the Rolodex or the phone. Harnessing the power of sales and marketing in a business is nothing new, yet in that role one must always be future-facing; strategizing to adapt to new tools to keep the customer happy and the business on track.

A growing number of enterprise IT professionals are recognizing the value of integration to their operations, but do the advantages of enterprise application integration really matter to the marketing department?

The short answer: yes.

>> Book a personalized demo with our team of experts and see how Digibee’s iPaaS will bring efficiency to your business. 

Balancing Customers, Relationships, and Management

With so many sales and marketing channels available now, a staggering amount of customer data is generated as users flow between them. 

Customer relationship management systems (or CRMs) were perhaps the earliest technical solution to the challenge of keeping your customer data organized. With various levels of sophistication, they have been helping support sales since the 1990s, first as stand-alone software, then also becoming an available component within the ERP systems of the day.

While this CRM integration into ERPs was a quantum leap forward in creating one holistic view of the many moving parts, there were still many limitations to relying on a software model.

Enterprise Integration: The Next Logical Step?

As far back as 2019, Forrester reported that “The enterprise resource planning (ERP) era is over.” Though the term ERP has tended to continue in usage, often being blended with EI as “ERP integration” or “ERP system integration”, the notion of an ERP as a single software omni-suite is quickly going the way of the CD-ROMs it was first distributed on. 

In a digital-first world where marketing now needs to employ analytics, SEO, lead capture/generation/nurturing, event marketing, ecommerce, and an ever-changing roster of social media tools, it’s not surprising that Gartner analysts predict that more than 85% of organizations will embrace a cloud-first principle by 2025.

As part of this trend, iPaaS for enterprise organizations are quickly coming to the attention of business leaders. By marrying the omnichannel approach of ERPs with the benefits of the cloud, enterprise integration provides flexibility without complexity.

3 Key Benefits of iPaaS for Marketing

There are several advantages of enterprise application integration that directly address marketing department priorities and challenges.

1. iPaaS Plays Well With Others

Being platform-agnostic is one such example of how a good iPaaS can provide such flexible no-hassle support. It doesn’t get hung up on whether the many tools you are trying to integrate are Microservices, APIs, or cloud-based. They can just as easily be cutting-edge or legacy. If SAP ERP integration is vital to your team’s success, it can now be completed quickly and with minimal downtime.

If your Social Media Manager finds themselves continuously switching between apps, an integration can bring focus and clarity to them while helping to deliver a consistent user experience to the customer. 

An effective enterprise ecommerce integration strategy can deliver benefits to both business and customer simultaneously:

“By integrating order fulfillment, a purchase on the website can use inventory information availability across warehouses and retail locations to determine the optimal place (both for the customer and for the business) to ship from based on destination.”

Sayer Martin, Forbes Council Member

2. iPaaS’ Security Keeps a Secret

Though security may not be the first thing that comes to mind for marketing, stop and ask yourself what happens in the aftermath of a data breach:

• What happens to your customer confidence, and your bottom line? 
• Who has to craft that message to try and regain trust? (And deal with all the negative customer feedback?)

Simply put, in a world where data breaches are routinely making headlines, moving to an enterprise iPaaS that offers 24/7 monitoring and unparalleled protection and security means less stress for your customer, which translates into less stress for you.

3. iPaaS Supports New Experiences

More so than any other department, marketing needs to be able to recognize and adapt to new trends. As part of this, you need the freedom to adopt the newest tools as soon as they become available.

An iPaaS with a low-code approach allows new tools to be integrated quickly and with less time stuck waiting for your internal developers, and reusable components make managing all the business logic behind them simple.

“Marketing is a science. It relies on real-time data and accurate analytics to shed light on current performance–what’s working and what isn’t–while informing decisions that drive future improvements. This synchronous environment is only possible if all systems are connected.” 

Cait Porte, CMO, Digibee

Implementation: Logical Steps & Common Missteps

Although there are clearly many benefits to a business, our recent State of Enterprise Integration Report found 71% of those polled are actively planning to adopt, supplement, or replace their integration technology.

While this is a majority, many businesses are ending up frustrated in their implementation efforts, reporting impediments that are the inverse of what an EI is meant to provide: 

• 39% impeded innovation
• 42% ineffective practices
• 36% lack of agility

Innovation, inefficiency, and agility are imperative in order to meet marketing objectives.

The root cause of these negative impacts is often a piecemeal approach to the original integration strategy. The high-level advantages of enterprise application integration may be well understood by the internal tech team tasked to bring it to fruition, but without collaboration with the C-suite and product owners, they lack a depth of understanding of other roles and how they work.

Where this happens it is easy to be left with a system that – while technically integrated – is in no way optimized for each individual team’s needs.

Compare these numbers to relevant numbers pulled from the 2022 SEI Report. Attempting to remediate this after the fact often results in a frustrating loop of building and fixing, with 98% of 2022 report respondents reporting they had to rebuild their integrations within a year.

Number of integrations that had to be rebuilt

The impacts of getting caught in this loop can include potential downtime where data is unavailable during rebuilds and then having to re-learn a whole new ERP system integration every time.

Stop the Stop-Gap Solutions

Anyone leading a marketing department already understands how vital a well thought-out strategy is to the success of a project. This strategic lens positions a CMO as an incredibly valuable contributor to a successful EI implementation.

With the changing responsibilities of today’s CMO, the role has often expanded to encompass every aspect of the customer experience. Requiring so many different platforms to generate this customer data, a CMO is poised to be one of the best advocates for ensuring the integration brings benefit to both the business and the customer.  

Remember the key elements a marketing team needs most: platform-agnostic, secure, and adaptable. The flexible solutions offered by Digibee are all three, meaning your ecommerce integration, CRM integration, and the integration of the many other tools your team relies on can be completed in weeks, not months. 

Book a personalized demo with our team of experts and see how Digibee’s iPaaS will bring efficiency to your Marketing team.

Financial institutions are facing a uniquely challenging technological landscape. As their customers increasingly demand the personalized digital experiences they enjoy in other sectors, banks are left having to bridge the gaps between ease-of-access and security, speed and accuracy, competitive fees and vast, complex data systems.

Their core banking system architecture is too important to risk with a cavalier approach, but more flexibility is needed to stay competitive and adapt to emerging trends. As a large financial institution, how can you facilitate the right change when there is so little room for error?

>> Book a personalized demo with our team of experts and see how Digibee’s iPaaS will bring efficiency to your business. 

The Current State of Banking Technology 

Aging data centers and legacy systems still underpin the core banking system architecture used in financial sectors. When saddled with legacy back-end technology in banking core systems, which encompasses the essential services such as accounts, online payments, personal loans and mortgages, a bank has a lot of work to do to update their tech stack.

The fix is often not as simple as indiscriminately tearing out everything old and replacing it with the newest thing on the market. 

Take, for example, COBOL, a programming language still commonly used by banks today. It was developed in 1959, making it several years older than the average CEO. Is this legacy banking system ready for retirement? Sources disagree whether it represents an evolutionary dead end, or still provides core business value.

Mainframe and COBOL, when properly maintained, are still able to handle the daily transaction processing of an integrated banking system, and even 60+ years later IBM continues to provide updates and support. 

The connections between these complex systems must also be considered. Will the flexibility needed to modernize be found through native integration vs API? Roughly 40% of mid-sized banks don’t yet have an API strategy, as only the largest banks can afford the time and resource expenditure of building and maintaining all their own APIs with internal IT teams.

The Modern Banking Customer 

The modern banking customer has grown to expect easy access to their money and financial information. Although the reality of these transactions – which involve retrieving and transferring financial information between institutions who could be under differing governing regulations, and require connecting with a foreign bank integration API – is truly anything but, an app’s slick user interfaces make it all feel very simple from that user’s point of view. 

This sense of ease of use, and desire for empowerment is only expected to grow as a customer demand. Gartner lists the three evolutions of digital in financial services are:

• easier self-service transactions
• empowered customer journeys
• embedded financial relationships

As the FinTech sector grows, more competitors to traditional banking come online, eager and better-positioned to meet all of these technological opportunities. At the same time, many countries are making changes that impact the financial regulations governing their banks, meaning any advantage a traditional bank might have with years of history under its belt may be lost in the need to quickly pivot to align with a whole new mode of operation.

Open banking policies are a prime example of how shifts in financial regulations have demanded rapid change from the financial institutions of many countries.

“The financial system has been structured [over centuries] to protect bank details and has created internal strengths for that. Open banking changes this premise and establishes that the data is no longer owned by the bank. It is a violent cultural change.”

Carlos Augusto de Oliveira, director and coordinator of the technology forums of the Brazilian Banking Association (ABBC), on Brazil’s shift to open banking in 2020

Bridging the Gap with Enterprise Integration

Wherever you land on retiring the COBOL mainframe, or any other legacy banking system still in use in the financial world, the key takeaway is that the gap between traditional banking and the modern banking customer has to be bridged.

“(Banking) systems generally have technologies that are out of date with the needs and standards of security, performance and scalability that are required for today’s connected world.”

Peter Kreslins Junior, Digibee CTO and cofounder 

This still leaves a complex dilemma in front of banks: 

• Review their entire legacy system and find an internal way to make these API integrations feasible, or 
• Seek alternative platforms that work with focus on modern digital financial services. 

“I see this second option as a trend, the market is moving in that direction. With the platforms that connect more easily, banks enable and accelerate this integration without needing a high investment, which is essential, taking into account the tight schedule and limited budgets of some institutions,” points out the director of ABBC. 

Enterprise Integration Platform-as-a-Service, especially when supported by the right vendor with financial industry experience, provides an excellent option. A good iPaaS works to support legacy systems, giving the flexibility needed to allow a financial institution to marry the latest-and-greatest with the tried-and-true into one seamless system. 

When comparing API vs integration, especially iPaaS, the main factors to consider are cost and time needed to build. To build one new API integration, a developer must have a high level of skill and a deep understanding of the two specific systems being connected, with the bank integration API, making it a time-consuming and costly endeavor.

The shift to a low-code platform with pre-built reusable tools streamlines the API build process, and automation lends new levels of operational efficiency both to the building of the system and to maintaining it. 

Digibee Knows Banking Integration

Digibee has real-world experience working with banks that need to modernize banking core systems fast. In a partnership with a global banking institution, the 5th largest commercial bank in Brazil, Digibee successfully delivered a fully automated and secure integration solution in record time.

Whether your financial institution is trying to create an integrated banking system that relies on Microservices, ESB/Cloud, or APIs, Digibee’s local interface can connect and shift data securely to the Digibee platform in real-time.

Learn more about how Digibee can support your financial institution on its modernization journey or, if you prefer, request a demo to see our solution in action.