Release 6: Collaborative Ecosystem (Sep 2024)
Simple integration with market innovations and through Alfa’s trusted partner network.
Delivered in a series of six releases, Alfa Systems 6 helps finance providers tackle the significant challenges they face, and seize the lucrative opportunities that lie waiting.
Why Collaborative Ecosystem?
Collaborative Ecosystem in Alfa Systems 6 allows customers to tap into Alfa’s expertise and best practices to source and integrate with new technologies, creating customised, end-to-end solutions - painlessly.
Empowering Alfa Systems and its customers with solutions that deliver tangible functionality and value, Collaborative Ecosystem is designed to:
- Enable efficient access to new technology: Drawing on Alfa’s large catalogue of REST APIs, efficiently designed SPIs, and leading-edge data transfer technology, you can easily integrate new software and services into the core Alfa Systems 6 platform. By working with our architects and accredited partners, you can achieve powerful integrations with up-to-date technology and build your own customised platform - and help drive innovation within your organisation.
- Take advantage of Alfa’s knowledge and experience: Alfa’s network of consultants and technical experts collaborate to build up a rich knowledgebase of integration case studies and solutions, helping customers to refine their choices and understand best practices.
- Access trained, knowledgeable local resources: Alfa’s partnership ecosystem goes beyond software collaborations; our delivery partnerships offer customers access to local resources fully trained on Alfa Systems configuration and processes, enhanced by Alfa’s AI assistant, AskThea.
See Collaborative Ecosystem in action:
Collaborative Ecosystem in Alfa Systems 6
"With Alfa Systems 6, our focus remains on delivering cutting-edge technology capabilities to our customers. Its rich configuration options and extensible APIs enable the creation of innovative, tailored solutions that adapt easily to tomorrow’s demands.
"Collaborative Ecosystem not only makes it easy to access new technologies through our robust API framework and state-of-the-art data transfer technologies, but also harnesses our network of consultants and technical experts to provide unparalleled support and insights. And we’re here to guide you every step of the way.”
Introducing Collaborative Ecosystem in Alfa Systems 6
No solution stands alone, and while Alfa Systems 6 excels at meeting your needs, its true potential is unlocked through collaboration with synergistic partners and solutions.
One of Alfa's core values, Make it better together, applies beyond the concepts of teamwork and partnership, also incorporating complementary software and services. Only by harnessing diverse strengths can we deliver excellence.
With these principles in mind, our product strategy is not to achieve everything, but to develop a deep understanding of the software landscape that complements our product. This allows us to deliver highly tailored solutions for our customers.
As a technology platform provider, our responsibility goes beyond researching and evaluating these options; we also ensure seamless integration, giving our customers effortless access to a full range of software solutions. Collaborative Ecosystem in Alfa Systems 6 provides the following features:
- An extensible suite of modern APIs, supporting integration use cases that cover the end-to-end lifecycle of an asset finance contract. Alfa Systems 6’s powerful workflow, webhooks and business rules enable you to orchestrate your entire ecosystem. Easily implement and manage integrations directly from Alfa Systems 6 through configuration, eliminating the need for vendor development.
- Data Pipeline, providing change data capture (CDC) event streams for rapid, real-time data transfer. Using Apache Kafka, the industry standard for real-time streaming data pipelines, CDC enables efficient connectivity of Alfa Systems 6's rich operational reporting data to downstream data and BI platforms.
- Seamless access to the AWS ecosystem through Alfa Cloud. Benefit from state-of-the-art technology tools, such as those used to build Alfa’s AI assistant, AskThea. Securely integrate these tools into your ecosystem to drive innovation and efficiency.
Cutting-edge integration solutions
1. Modern APIs, webhooks and integration partnerships
Alfa Systems 6 offers a robust suite of web services with over 200 granular endpoints, exposing its rich functionality to external systems, facilitating seamless integration, and enabling applications to leverage Alfa Systems 6 as a comprehensive financial and portfolio administration engine.
Modern APIs, webhooks and integration partnerships in Alfa Systems 6
With over 200 endpoints available across every business process, there are no limitations on call volume, ensuring scalability and flexibility in integration scenarios.
The functionality exposed through web services maintains parity with the features available in the user interface, providing consistency and enabling a smooth transition between UI-based and automated processes.
The granularity of the web service endpoints allows for precise control and fine-grained access to specific functionalities, enhancing flexibility and customisation options.
Web services in Alfa Systems 6 are designed with versioning and backwards compatibility at the forefront, ensuring smooth transitions during system upgrades or changes.
Web services include built-in functionality to facilitate application support, making it easier to troubleshoot issues and maintain system stability.
Alfa Systems 6 provides comprehensive documentation for its web services, including OpenAPI specifications, WSDLs and Swagger-based documentation. This documentation ensures clarity, ease of integration, and streamlined development processes for external systems.
Alfa Systems supports both REST/JSON and SOAP/XML protocols, catering to diverse integration requirements and allowing developers to choose the most suitable approach for their applications.
Alfa Systems 6 offers a range of synchronous integrations with external systems, which can be triggered directly from within the platform, functioning as Service Provider Integrations (SPIs). These SPIs facilitate seamless connections, allowing efficient and real-time data exchange between Alfa Systems 6 and external platforms. Below are a few of the many standard SPIs currently in use with our customers:
- Document management. Integrates with a document store to upload and retrieve documents.
- Customer search. Integrates with enterprise systems, such as a CRM, for retrieval of customer information.
- Bank account validation. Validates bank account details such as account and routing numbers.
- Credit decisioning. Requests credit decisioning metrics from an external system for automated credit decisioning.
This flexible integration pattern allows you to connect Alfa Systems 6 seamlessly with the vendor solution of your choice, eliminating the need for custom development.
Case study: Automating payment holidays
The increasing volume of payment holiday requests in the industry has fuelled a demand for greater automation. Alfa Systems 6's versatile integration toolkit offers the flexibility needed to explore and implement automated solutions for existing processes.
A successful integration that took place across the entire ecosystem, transforming a process from hours to minutes
This example showcases a successful integration across the entire ecosystem, leveraging digital portals, decision-making tools, and customer correspondence. By utilising Alfa Systems 6’s comprehensive functionality, including web services, business rules and workflow management, we've orchestrated a process that spans the technical ecosystem.
This seamless integration enables an end-to-end, fully digital capability, allowing customers to request and process payment holidays with just a few clicks - transforming a process from one that took hours to one that takes just minutes. End customers were awarded the convenience of self-serving payment holidays directly through the online portal, leading to a substantial reduction in call centre enquiries, thereby streamlining operations and improving the overall customer experience.
2. Real-time data streaming
At Alfa we fully recognise that our customers use Alfa Systems as one component of a wider technology landscape. Accordingly, in addition to real-time data APIs, in-app reporting and the Operational Data Store (ODS) - supplied as part of the core feature set of Alfa Systems 6 - Alfa has built an event streaming service providing change data capture (CDC), powered by Apache Kafka.
This service delivers a continuous stream of real-time reporting data events, enabling customers to combine their real-time Alfa Systems reporting data easily with that from other systems into a central repository or data warehouse, lake or lakehouse. From there, they can leverage enterprise-wide BI tools for deeper insights and operational reporting.
3. Access to the AWS ecosystem and marketplace via Alfa Cloud
AI's rapid evolution has ushered in a wave of new technological tools, transforming how businesses operate and innovate. Positioned within the AWS ecosystem, Alfa Cloud - Alfa’s standardised, single-tenant, cloud-native SaaS solution - places the latest advancements at your fingertips. This ongoing access is crucial as the technology landscape is continually evolving, offering fresh opportunities to boost efficiency and effectiveness.
As highlighted in Release 4: Scalability, Alfa Cloud is designed for customers looking to scale their offering efficiently, both dynamically and on demand.
Leading-edge technologies and automated services empower customers to roll out innovative solutions to the market, ensuring optimal performance - not only for daily operations, but also during high-demand periods with resource-intensive processes.
Choosing Alfa Systems 6 gives you access to a wide and ever-expanding range of AWS services and tools, within a fully integrated environment, already connected within the cloud. Regardless of where your other technology resides, using Alfa Cloud eliminates the need to navigate internal network boundaries, allowing for a smoother adaptation to changing technological demands and keeping your systems at the forefront of innovation.
These rapidly evolving toolsets enable the combination of innovation and prototyping to produce breakthrough solutions. This allows Alfa to deliver up-to-the-minute technical and functional solutions, without starting from scratch.
AI-as-a-Service in the collaborative ecosystem: Use case
In recent years, several AI-driven solutions have emerged, designed to automate the originations business process. A recent proof of concept enabled Alfa to take advantage of these advancements, along with key AWS services, to automate the majority of the funding journey.
Digital contracting: The funding journey, orchestrated in Alfa Systems 6
Workflow in Alfa Systems 6 orchestrates the entire end-to-end process, allowing customers to configure and adapt it to their specific requirements. Crucially, the solution isn't tied to specific providers, offering extensibility and the flexibility to plug in new and improved services as they emerge in the market.
Key highlights:
- Once the quote is captured, customer data is sent to KYC, Fraud and Affordability solutions for verification. Workflow triggers additional manual verification automatically when pertinent information is flagged, using Alfa Systems 6’s business rules to automate the decisioning.
- Customer correspondence and CRM updates are handled by the group solution, with metadata forwarded from Alfa Systems 6 at a specific step in the workflow. Automation is further enhanced through integrated e-signing capabilities.
- Processing and classification of documents within the contract pack - such as supplier invoices and identification - is prime automation territory. Our proof of concept used AWS services and AI via advanced large language models to automate the classification and validation of such documents, ensuring dynamically that they align with the contract stored in Alfa Systems 6.
Alfa Systems 6: The Orchestrator
Looking back to Digital Directions 3: Building a digital ecosystem for asset finance.
Produced in 2022, Digital Directions 3 drew on industry experts’ input to understand a future in which technology’s power is channelled not by individual operators, but by many participants, who collaborate on delivering new value that exceeds the sum of its parts.
We offered insight into the emerging role of technology providers as ecosystem orchestrators, identified various types of ecosystem, and discussed the opportunities to deploy them in order to meet the needs of the auto and equipment finance industries.
"A new role emerges for an orchestrator who acts like a conductor in an orchestra, making each participant work effectively and harmoniously with the others, just as a conductor seeks to make the woodwind work with the strings."
With its robust workflow capabilities and powerful APIs and webhooks, Alfa Systems 6 has become that orchestrator: accelerating the funding journey significantly, providing decisions in seconds and a conclusion to the process as soon as delivery logistics allow.
"The symbiotic ecosystem is the most common model deployed by leading technology companies like Alfa. The technology platform provider typically acts as orchestrator, creating or coordinating a community of technology solutions which conform to rules set out by the dominant platform provider."
Collaborative Ecosystem: Meeting challenge and opportunity
Alfa Systems 6 can transform your business, open up new revenue streams, and bring heightened productivity to your operation.
Incoming regulations on e-invoicing and VAT reporting for cross-border transactions in Europe may not necessarily streamline the entire global invoicing landscape, given that individual countries maintain their own standards. For instance, the UK does not mandate compliance with the PEPPOL standard, even for cross-border transactions.
The varying standards and formats across different regimes present an opportunity to expedite compliance by integrating with an e-invoicing solution that delivers the required structured data directly to government intermediaries. In addition, cloud-based large language models (LLMs) and text extraction services can extract and simplify data from invoices outside of these regulations, to support analysis and reporting.
Businesses continue to face significant levels of uncertainty, with the push for sustainable solutions often clashing with short-term needs and the challenge of verifying clear business cases. As a result, equipment and auto finance providers need to increase their agility to navigate this uncertainty. This involves piloting new products and processes, such as usage-based products, X-as-a-Service offerings and subscription-based solutions.
Achieving such agility requires leveraging technology at low cost, allowing businesses to experiment, prototype and determine which solutions align with their goals and market demand. For example, some companies exploring X-as-a-Service models discovered that flexible-length leases with usage-based billing were a better fit. A successful outcome was achieved by partnering with a telematics provider, tracking each asset, with Alfa Systems’ API - demonstrating how rapid iteration and agility can deliver impactful results.
Schumpeter’s Theory of Creative Destruction is playing out vividly: rapid technological advancements are forcing both technology and finance companies to develop the capacity, resilience and maturity to keep up.
For finance companies, the exploration of cloud-based AI and other tooling to drive innovation and build new features means that they require technology providers with a proven track record of continuous innovation and evolution; partners they can trust to deliver for decades to come.
Customer expectations continue to evolve, driven by a greater understanding of the capabilities of technology and the prevalence of high-concept, tightly integrated ecosystems in everyday life, from discussions around ChatGPT to the sophisticated integrated services embedded in iOS and Android.
Whether your customers are consumers, SMEs, enterprises or even internal stakeholders, they are likely to disengage if you're not using new technologies effectively to provide the cohesive, integrated experience they now expect. A flexible ecosystem enables you to meet these demands by incorporating best-of-breed technologies and adapting as the market evolves.