How to build better fintech products through integrations feat. Gil Feig, CTO and co-founder of Merge

Financial firms face growing pressure to deliver products that meet the evolving expectations of customers. 

Financial firms encounter 2 major challenges when it comes to customer experiences:

• Offering secure data access: Providing secure, high-quality, and controlled access to their customers’ financial data in order to provide valuable services on top of that data.
• Designing a smooth UX: Delivering a smooth UX, whether that’s allowing customers to make fewer mistakes when transferring data between systems or reducing the number of applications a client has to manage actively.

“We’ve learned [about these challenges] firsthand from our customers, which include Ramp, Revolut, and BILL,” says Gil Feig, CTO and co-founder of Merge. “A common denominator across these goals is the need for customer-facing integrations.”

Merge is a platform that helps firms integrate with clients’ cloud-based accounting, payroll, and HR systems.

Siloed systems and fragmented customer journeys often hinder financial firms’ ability to provide cohesive solutions and smooth customer experiences. Product integrations can offer a way to overcome these challenges.

That’s not lost on bankers. 69% of business leaders at mid-size to large banks rely on product integrations to delight customers consistently, while nearly 47% view them as essential for avoiding customer issues, according to a recent survey by Merge and Centiment.

So, how can financial firms optimize product integrations in the face of their backend technical challenges?

This is where companies like Merge can step in.

Why Merge: Merge enables its clients to streamline their customer experiences while maintaining a single source of truth by integrating with their ERP systems.

Merge facilitates this and other comparable use cases by offering a Unified API that enables B2B financial firms to implement numerous customer-facing integrations through a single integration.

The firm also handles the full integration lifecycle. So in addition to the initial implementation, it provides customer-facing teams with the tooling they need to manage clients’ integrations. 

“Merge’s team fully owns the maintenance of the integrations,” adds Feig.

Merge’s co-founder, Shensi Ding, likens the firm’s approach to a universal takeout service, where customers can order from different restaurants — Chinese, Indian, or Italian — without being frustrated by each restaurant’s individual system.

Feig co-founded Merge with Shensi Ding in 2020, whom he first met as a freshman at Columbia University’s School of Engineering. After graduation, they worked at different startups, where they kept running into the same challenge: managing integrations. This motivated them to step up and tackle the issue through their own endeavor.

“We created Merge to solve this problem for B2B SaaS companies, building a solution that allows engineering teams to build and scale integrations quickly, saving engineering and product teams thousands of hours (and countless headaches!),” shares Feig.

How integrations enable 3 critical use cases for financial firms

Feig outlines 3 key use cases that financial firms can enable through these integrations:

1. Corporate card programs: Fintechs and banks can use Merge to add over 70 HRIS integrations to their platforms, enabling them to automate card provisioning for their customers’ employees. Additionally, they can use Merge’s ERP integrations to help accountants close their books faster since all transaction data is synced between the card platform and the clients’ ERP solutions.

2. Financial planning and analysis: FP&A tools can integrate with more than a dozen ERP systems, enabling them to access the financial data they need to power comprehensive, accurate, and actionable models and reports. 

“Additionally, we see institutional banks access their customers’ ERP data to help inform their lending decisions and provide better insights into their clients’ financial health,” says Feig.

3. AI-powered enterprise search and insights: Every enterprise AI offering is grounded in customer data. 

“We’re confident Merge is the infrastructure that allows financial firms to power features like enterprise search, where AI delivers customer-specific insights and documents based on all of the information it’s ingested from the integrated systems,” notes Feig.

Merge’s role in product integrations

Feig uses TaxBit, an all-in-one compliance and reporting solution for the digital economy, as an example of how Merge helps with fintech integrations.

TaxBit wanted to integrate with ERP systems to let its customers post double-sided journal entries directly into their general ledgers.

TaxBit integrated Merge’s Unified API in a few weeks, allowing them to quickly build customer-facing ERP integrations with key ERP providers and sync a wide range of financial data, such as journal entries, income statements, and invoices for payables and receivables.

“By using Merge to power their ERP integrations, TaxBit’s engineers can save countless hours while their sales team can sell into target markets in Europe and Latin America successfully (as many companies in these regions use specific ERP systems),” shares Feig.

Product integrations for banks vs. fintechs

When implementing product integrations, FIs face challenges around time management and tech stack upgrades.

“The banks that are interested in growing their offerings typically lack the in-house structure and resources necessary to spearhead start-up style fintech products. Acquisitions may also not always make sense,” notes Feig.

Banks often face issues with bugs in customer-facing integrations, requiring their engineers to dedicate significant time to fixing them. According to the Merge survey, about 75% of banks allocate at least 10 engineering hours each week just to maintain their integrations, and this time commitment impacts their business performance.

As a result, 57% of banks report delays in building critical product features, with the same percentage saying it prevents them from fixing key product bugs on time, as their engineers are tied up with integration maintenance.

Fintechs, on the other hand, have built strong customer loyalty around services like corporate cards in a relatively shorter time, a product banks have provided for years. Fintechs’ edge comes from modern tech stacks and a proactive approach to product integrations.

“To catch up, banks need to do exactly the same,” says Feig.

For instance, if banks offer corporate card programs, they should build API-based integrations with the HRIS solutions their customers use, according to Feig. This enables banks to provision automatically and de-provision cards across the customers’ employee populations.

“This is exactly what Revolut, a multinational neobank, does,” Feig says.

“Integrations allow them [FIs] to leverage existing fintech tools’ data and functionality for their customers, making it a win-win situation,” he notes. 

“This can be made all the more possible with the rise of integration solutions like Merge, which enable banks to integrate with fintech solutions at scale easily.”