To build vs. buy, why not the best of both?

Right now, all areas of financial services are under enormous pressure to adopt AI technology to make more money or save more money.

If you work in banking, you’re probably feeling the weight of that challenge and trying to figure out the best move to play.

In an industry that deals with such sensitive data, you can’t just take ChatGPT or Gemini off the shelf and use it to process secure information.

It might seem like there are only two available options: 1) Build your own or 2) buy from a vendor.

Neither route is trouble-free.

Firstly, the build road is a long and winding one. And because it’s long and winding, it’s likely to be very expensive. Some say the build process could take years, and millions of dollars, plus re-allocating internal resources from working on your core banking products to internal systems. 

Developing your own state-of-the-art, generative AI-powered financial services solution is also (perhaps unsurprisingly) a tricky undertaking and requires extensive expertise in the field. This specialist experience is probably not readily available in your business, which means bringing in talent, creating more costs and time delays.

Simply because it’s a such a complex job, there is also a risk you won’t get things right first time – and there’s a decent chance the project will fail completely.

And even if you pass the finish line successfully – how do you then scale your solution as technology, customer demands and business challenges grow and evolve?

Perhaps it’s best to simply buy a genAI platform. What could go wrong when buying a proven product from an established vendor? 

Well, most new systems won’t integrate with your existing platforms and networks. You know, those same systems you’ve already spent a fortune on, and are committed to until around the turn of the millennium? 

This could mean investing in an entirely new tech stack – or operating multiple systems at once, making things more complicated and more siloed. And that might also mean locking-in another agreement with a specific vendor – making you over-reliant on one supplier for longer than you want.

Plus, as you’re buying an off-the-shelf product, it’s fair to say it may not meet every specific need your business has. When you think about it, how can there be a ready-made product for every company and every challenge? Often, these GenAI platform solutions are pretty rigid in what they offer too, so the products can’t be customized by the user to match the requirements.

So, if building your own platform is problematic and expensive, and buying one is inflexible and difficult to integrate – what move do you make?

Both.

There isn’t actually a question of build or buy anymore – as it’s now possible to combine both approaches for maximum flexibility and efficiency.

We can now give financial services the chance to buy a stable, proven platform that’s already trusted by Tier 1 banks – AND then build it and customize it to meet your needs.

Lucinity’s latest adaptable platform has the flexibility for users to tailor-make their own AI solutions to meet their needs – saving months of time and potentially hundreds of thousands of dollars.

Luci Studio 

One of the most common things we hear from banks is that they love Lucinity products but they have an old system they can’t get rid of, or a new tech stack they’ve just invested in. With our new Luci AI Studio, that’s not a problem.

Our new AI framework also enables banks to build custom AI skills and end-to-end workflows – and on a trusted platform that our expert teams have been working on for over five years. We are literally years ahead of the game.

The framework incorporates RPA (Robotic Process Automation), AI and Generative AI, in a system we call GIPA (Generative Intelligence Process Automation). This development uses advanced artificial intelligence technologies to automate vast amounts of manual work.

Users can choose from pre-made skills, such as summarizing documents, checking addresses or scanning media articles – or they can configure templates, reports and emails for the AI to pick up and run.

It means time-consuming manual tasks can be carried out, such as reading and analyzing a 150-page document, or understanding a customer through searching online, checking social media feeds, exploring company registers etc. – reducing search and analysis time from hours to minutes.

And all of this configurability is completed through simple drag and drop functionality, without a letter of code needing to be written.

Lastly, because Lucinity’s heritage is in FinCrime, our platform is designed for maximum auditability with the highest standards of security to protect data, track decision making and build trust.

 To summarize:

Build your own:

• High costs
• Highly complex
• Scalability difficult
• High risk of failure

Buy traditional off-the-shelf:

• Inflexible
• Difficult to integrate
• Locked into vendor
• Limited customization

Lucinity platform: Combines stability of a proven platform with flexibility for tailor-made AI development.

• Proven stability
• Flexible AI framework
• Simple data integration
• Enterprise-Ready
• Automates manual tasks 

With that in mind, the question is not ‘Should I build or buy?’ – it’s: ‘Why not do both?'