Executive insights: The value of partnership and collaboration

As we close the book on 2024, now is the perfect time to reflect on the past year in fintech and the lessons learned that we will be taking with us into 2025.

Some of the key trends over the past year included optimism for a busy 2025 across lending verticals, the increasing adoption of AI in financial services and growing momentum for open banking. However, an equally significant trend has been the strength of partnerships and collaborations within the industry.

We spoke with Ocrolus SVP of Growth David Snitkof, CEO Sam Bobley and COO Vik Dua about why financial organizations should prioritize collaboration over competition.

David: Fintechs should work together to best serve their customers

The U.S. banking industry is large and fragmented. While this presents challenges, it also creates substantial opportunities for consumers and businesses to select the service providers that best meet their needs. When customers have a choice, it raises the bar for quality, user experience, personalization and cost. It’s unlikely that any single technology or company can meet such high expectations for every type of customer, product and use case. Fintech firms can often better serve the diverse needs of the market when they work together.

Each vertical within financial services – from small business lending to mortgage to consumer lending – has its own unique needs, challenges and opportunities that benefit from a focused approach. For example, one fintech provider may excel at a particular technology, while another may have focused expertise and differentiated distribution within a particular vertical. We have achieved and observed the best outcomes when multiple fintech companies have leveraged their respective strengths to build an exceptionally high-standards experience for the end customer.

Sam: More value in growing the pie than fighting over slices

The fintech community is still a relatively small group looking to disrupt a massive legacy market in financial services. With this in mind, collaboration within the community makes sense; there’s much more value in partnering to grow the overall “fintech pie” versus fighting over individual slices.

For example, Nova Credit is a credit infrastructure and analytics company that focuses on account opening, consumer lending and tenant screening use–cases. By utilizing Ocrolus to analyze documents such as bank statements and pay stubs, Nova provides a complete, best-in-class experience to its end-users. This synergistic partnership allows both Ocrolus and Nova to capture market share faster than either company could accomplish on its own.

Vik: Partnership over competition

It’s important to remember that there should be a balance between collaboration and competition – of course, competition is always healthy to some extent. Nevertheless, our philosophy is to approach competitors as potential partners and “see opportunities, not obstacles.”

There will always be some competitive overlap in our industry, but there are many opportunities to team up and deliver truly innovative financial solutions.

Some of our strongest solutions have been built from this partnership over-competition mindset. Take our work with Plaid, for example. We could have initially seen each other as competitors, but the reality is we are attacking a similar problem from totally different angles. Thus, we started conversations about our strengths and product roadmaps and found that our businesses are more complementary than competitive.

Today, our partnership with Plaid is bidirectional and mutually successful!

While competition will always exist and can drive us to reach our fullest potential, working together to expand what’s possible is the most promising path forward. The success of our partnerships at Ocrolus helps demonstrate that collaboration isn’t just an idealistic vision – it’s a proven strategy for building better financial infrastructure.

Learn how we can build the future of fintech infrastructure together. Explore partnerships with Ocrolus.

Key takeaways

• The financial market is so large and fragmented no single technology or service provider could realistically dominate the entire space.
• Financial services providers and fintech companies can create more value by working together to expand opportunities rather than competition for business.
• Some of our strongest solutions have been built from a “partnership over competition” mindset, as shown through our work with  Nova Credit, Plaid and many others.