The financial services landscape is undergoing rapid transformation, and technology has become the key differentiator. It’s no longer just about keeping the lights on—digital platforms, data intelligence, and automation now define who leads and who lags. The convergence of customer expectations, regulatory complexity, and legacy inefficiencies is pushing financial institutions to rethink how they deliver value.
Leaders across banks, NBFCs, fintechs, and wealth management firms are tasked not only with maintaining compliance, but also with enabling agility, intelligence, and growth. At WalkingTree Technologies, we’ve partnered with leading financial institutions to address their most critical challenges with AI, automation, cloud, and next-gen engineering.
Here are the core challenges shaping the financial industry—and how we help solve them to deliver real competitive advantage.
1. Legacy Core Systems and Technical Debt
The Challenge:
Monolithic core applications, brittle batch jobs, and manual operations slow product launches and increase incident risk.
Our Solution:
- Use the strangler‑fig modernization pattern to incrementally extract capabilities into microservices (avoid big‑bang rewrites).
- Introduce an Application Programming Interface (API) gateway with rate limiting, authentication and authorization, and circuit‑breakers; add a service mesh for reliability.
- Move from batch to real time using Change Data Capture (CDC) and event streaming to decouple systems.
- Migrate data incrementally with dual‑write safeguards and reconciliation reports.
- Use blue‑green or canary deployments with automated rollbacks.
- Establish full observability (metrics, logs, traces) and Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) runbooks.
Key Benefits:
Faster time‑to‑market, lower outage risk, incremental return on investment, and easier scaling.
2. Regulatory Compliance and Auditability
The Challenge:
Evolving Reserve Bank of India (RBI) and Securities and Exchange Board of India (SEBI) regulations, Anti‑Money Laundering (AML) and Know Your Customer (KYC) controls, and strict auditability requirements create operational burden.
Our Solution:
- Enforce policy as code (for example, Open Policy Agent) for access, data handling, and transaction controls.
- Tokenize Personally Identifiable Information (PII), apply field‑level encryption, and implement Write Once Read Many (WORM) retention policies.
- Generate automated audit evidence (configuration snapshots, approval trails, immutable logs).
- Maintain data lineage and cataloging to record who changed what, when, and why.
- Use maker–checker workflows with four‑eyes approvals for sensitive actions.
Key Benefits:
Lower compliance effort, cleaner audits, stronger data governance, and reduced regulatory risk.
3. Siloed Data and Poor Data Quality
The Challenge:
Fragmented loan, payment, and customer data cause inconsistent Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) and unreliable reporting.
Our Solution:
- Establish a lakehouse/warehouse with unified business semantics and Master Data Management (MDM).
- Enforce data‑quality rules with Service Level Agreements (SLAs) and automated anomaly alerts.
- Build standardized metric marts and a governed metrics layer.
- Provide a self‑service data catalog with lineage and access requests.
- Reconcile postings between core systems, payments, and the General Ledger (GL) using automated break reports.
Key Benefits:
Single source of truth, faster insights, and confident decision‑making.
4. Slow, Manual Loan Origination and Underwriting
The Challenge:
Paper‑heavy processes lead to turnaround delays, leakages, and inconsistent credit decisions.
Our Solution:
- Digitize applications with Optical Character Recognition (OCR), electronic signature, and document‑quality checks.
- Plug‑and‑play integrations with credit bureaus and Know Your Customer (KYC) providers; configurable rule‑based scorecards.
- Machine‑Learning (ML) risk models with explainability and champion–challenger testing.
- Straight‑Through Processing (STP) for low‑risk cases; queue exceptions to underwriters with case management and audit trails.
Key Benefits:
Faster disbursals, lower operating cost, consistent risk decisions, and better customer experience.
5. Fraud, Credit Risk, and Real‑Time Monitoring
The Challenge:
Rising digital fraud and lagging risk signals across channels.
Our Solution:
- Device fingerprinting, velocity checks, and behavioral biometrics.
- Real‑time rule evaluation and Machine‑Learning scoring with a feature store and low‑latency serving.
- Graph and link analysis to detect mule networks and collusion.
- Alert‑triage playbooks with severity, Service Level Agreements (SLAs), and evidence capture.
- Post‑incident analytics, model‑drift monitoring, and continuous feedback loops.
Key Benefits:
Early warning, reduced losses, and a healthier portfolio.
6. Digital Onboarding and Know Your Customer (KYC) Friction
The Challenge:
Customer drop‑offs due to slow verification, document errors, and inconsistent channels.
Our Solution:
- Electronic Know Your Customer (eKYC) with liveness detection and spoof‑resistant face matching; automatic document extraction with Optical Character Recognition (OCR).
- Omnichannel save‑and‑resume, pre‑fill from consented data, and assisted journeys.
- Dynamic step‑up verification based on risk signals.
- A consent vault and granular data‑sharing logs visible to customers.
- Drop‑off analytics with split tests to improve screens and copy.
Key Benefits:
Higher conversion, compliant onboarding, and fewer manual reviews.
7. Collections and Non‑Performing Asset (NPA) Management
The Challenge:
Late risk identification and one‑size‑fits‑all dunning increase delinquencies and cost.
Our Solution:
- Early‑warning indicators using payment behavior, geospatial patterns, and bureau updates.
- Segmentation with a strategy matrix (soft dunning, offers, legal actions) by risk band.
- Digital dunning via SMS, WhatsApp, and Interactive Voice Response (IVR) with compliant templates and throttling.
- Payment plans, promise‑to‑pay tracking, and automatic follow‑ups.
- Field‑force mobile application with route optimization, geofencing, and evidence capture.
Key Benefits:
Lower delinquencies, improved recoveries, and optimized field cost.
8. Cybersecurity and Data Protection
The Challenge:
Expanding threat surface across Application Programming Interfaces (APIs), mobile applications, and partner ecosystems.
Our Solution:
- Zero‑trust Identity and Access Management (IAM) with Single Sign‑On (SSO), Multi‑Factor Authentication (MFA, including Fast Identity Online 2.0), least‑privilege access, and just‑in‑time administrative access.
- Centralized secrets management with Hardware Security Modules (HSMs) and Key‑Management Services (KMS); mutual Transport Layer Security (mTLS) and JSON Web Key Sets (JWKS) for APIs.
- Continuous security testing: Static Application Security Testing (SAST), Dynamic Application Security Testing (DAST), and Software Composition Analysis (SCA); container and cloud‑posture scanning.
- Tokenization and field‑level encryption; Data Loss Prevention (DLP) with exact‑data‑match rules.
- Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) with Security Orchestration, Automation, and Response (SOAR), backed by red‑team and purple‑team exercises.
Key Benefits:
Strong defense‑in‑depth, safer integrations, and reduced breach impact.
9. Open Banking and Third‑Party Integrations
The Challenge:
Long testing cycles and post‑release defects erode trust.
Our Solution:
- Shift‑left quality: unit tests, contract tests, and API tests in pull requests; ephemeral test environments.
- Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery (CI/CD) with quality gates (coverage and vulnerability budgets), canary releases, and automatic rollbacks.
- Test‑data management and synthetic data for edge cases.
- Performance testing and chaos testing tied to Service Level Objectives (SLOs) and error budgets.
- Post‑release monitoring with automated smoke probes.
Key Benefits:
Faster and safer releases, predictable delivery, and fewer production incidents.
10. Release Velocity and Quality at Scale
The Challenge:
Integrating with bureaus, Know Your Customer (KYC) providers, and financial‑technology partners without adding fragility.
Our Solution:
- Standardized partner adapters with versioned contracts.
- A partner sandbox with synthetic data and contract tests.
- Quotas, throttling, and back‑pressure; dead‑letter queues for failures.
- Webhooks with signature verification and replay protection.
- Per‑partner observability (latency, error budgets, and Service Level Objectives).
Key Benefits:
Faster partner onboarding, resilient data flows, and reduced vendor lock‑in.
11. Asset Auctions and Recovery Transparency
The Challenge:
Low transparency and high friction in collateral auctions and recoveries.
Our Solution:
- An asset registry with provenance, legal documents, and valuation history.
- An electronic‑auction engine with configurable rules, reserve price, and anti‑sniping protections.
- Bidder onboarding and Know Your Customer (KYC), Earnest Money Deposit (EMD) handling, and escrow flows.
- Real‑time bidding User Interface (UI), notifications, and comprehensive audit logs.
- Automatic award, invoicing, payment capture, and title‑transfer workflows.
Key Benefits:
Higher recoveries, fairer processes, and lower operational overhead.
These Problems Are Solvable—With the Right Partner
The challenges across financial services—legacy systems, strict regulatory demands, siloed data, and rising customer expectations—can seem overwhelming. But with the right strategy and execution partner, they are entirely solvable.
At WalkingTree Technologies, we blend deep financial domain expertise with next-generation capabilities in AI, Generative AI, SaaS platform engineering, cloud, DevOps, and data analytics. Whether you’re a bank modernizing digital channels, an NBFC streamlining loan operations, a fintech scaling disruptive products, or a wealth manager unlocking new insights—we can help.
We don’t just deliver technology. We co-create secure, scalable, and intelligent platforms that strengthen compliance, accelerate growth, and empower you to lead in an evolving financial landscape.