Westpac announces latest BaaS partner

Westpac has appointed identity and fraud platform FrankieOne as its identity infrastructure provider for the major bank’s new banking-as-a-service (BaaS) platform, which is expected to be available in the second half of 2021.

The Australian fintech, formerly known as Frankie Financial, offers ID verification, KYC, AML, fraud and credit tools into a single unified platform for banks.

It was announced as the partner at the 7th Annual Fintech Summit, presented by Amazon Web Services (AWS) after “an extensive global search”.

It is the second infrastructure partner to join the bank’s BaaS platform, alongside 10X Future Technologies.

To support Westpac’s goal of authorising businesses without a banking licence to deliver banking services from a licensed bank digitally, FrankieOne will create, connect and orchestrate all of Westpac’s BaaS identity infrastructure, including real-time and risk-based onboarding.

The fintech currently has 100 per cent of the Australian BaaS market share and services three out of four of Australia’s big four, with Westpac placing BaaS as a priority on its digital agenda.

FrankieOne CEO and founder Simon Costello said: “Historically, banks have had to work with dozens of siloed software and data providers, few of which have the ability to ‘talk to’ other systems. This creates clunky, disjointed internal processes, poor customer experience and, ultimately, business intelligence is compromised. 

“Whereas now Westpac has integrated into FrankieOne’s unified API they can ‘switch on’ new services for its customers, and access to over 170 different third-party vendors and data sources. This has enabled Westpac to supercharge its speed to market and remove the need for multiple vendor implementations. 

“The move to partner with Westpac forms part of our core vision to saving business billions in IT costs and providing superior customer experiences.

“As Australians continue to look for new and different ways to do their banking, we are excited to be part of the ever-growing BaaS movement with Westpac. Not only does BaaS help reduce the cost and time needed to launch banking services in Australia, but it will also accelerate efforts to innovate the fintech sector as a whole,” Mr Costello concluded.

Westpac has previously announced that marketplace lender SocietyOne had joined its new digital banking-as-a-service platform, following the appointment of Afterpay in 2020.

[Related: Westpac Group to close dozens of branches]