Knowis AG: The Innovation Factory for Credit Management

In a world dominated by modern digital-driven customers, financial institutions are striving to create value-added products and services to meet the demands. Banks are becoming increasingly aware of these requirements, but realizing them is often more difficult than expected. Digital initiatives are often time-consuming, over budget or the results are below the expectations. “The need of the hour is to scale the transformation of business opportunities into digital solutions—in a secure, reliable and cost effective way,” Dr. Gerald Gassner, CEO at knowis AG opines.

The knowis platform provides banks the foundation to create new products and services internally through easily repurposing business and core components while connecting to outside value providers through open APIs. The solution enables more engaging and relevant digital journeys for the bank’s customers as well as streamlined and automated processes on the inside. Positioned as the ‘Digital Agility Layer’, “our banking platform is the bridge between the core systems and the various channel implementations,” says Gassner. In addition to a rich set of business modules, which can be reused throughout multiple touchpoints, the platform’s data fabric provides a 360-degree view of the customer in different business contexts. With more than a decade of experience in providing credit management solutions, with a special focus on corporate lending, knowis has a long history of helping banks to accomplish their digital transformation successfully.

Customers expect us to co-create on an open platform to scale innovation

The approach is based on the creation of knowledge instead of only capturing information by connecting and contextualizing data points. This lays the foundation for the automation of knowledge-intensive processes.

In addition to the credit management know-how, knowis is also technologically strongly positioned. Based on an agile low-code platform and reusable solution templates, applications can be developed quickly and target-oriented. Through a rich set of APIs, the solutions are open to interconnect with internal and external components to improve the banks business processes or enable new products and services.

One example of the implementation of a major project is the introduction of a cross-divisional credit platform of HSH Nordbank. In just 12 months, a team of knowis employees, HSH Nordbank and IBM developed a modern banking solution based on the knowis platform that also considers the HSH legacy systems. The “Credit Management 4.0”, as it is called, proved to be a big step for HSH Nordbank, as this enabled the bank to immensely increase the performance and efficiency of its employees.

In the last months, the knowis team has invested significantly to create the next generation of the platform. In addition to predefined “integration points” for additional technologies like e.g. blockchain or internet of things (IoT), the knowis platform is now also available as a cloud-based service. Designed as a subscription-based offering, the knowis cloud platform opens up the offerings to smaller financial institutions and enables them to catch up with the digital capabilities reserved for larger banks before.