Great Southern Bank is set to run a live pilot of Constantinople, an end-to-end banking platform that was created by two ex-Westpac executives.
The Constantinople platform was "recently released" into production, the startup said late yesterday.
Great Southern Bank is Constantinople’s first client bank and will partake in a live pilot.
“Great Southern Bank is launching a business bank on our platform,” Constantinople co-founder and co-CEO Macgregor Duncan told iTnews.
“We're soon about to commence a pilot with Great Southern Bank that will be a staged pilot, starting with employees and then friends and family and then scaling up to customers.
“We would expect that Great Southern Bank would then be in a position to launch in market later this year.”
Great Southern Bank’s CEO Paul Lewis said in a statement that he was “really excited” to be the first banking client of Constantinople, “leveraging their cutting-edge software and operating platform to offer something new – a digital-first, customer-owned alternative in the small-to-medium enterprise (SME) space.”
Great Southern Bank also participated in a US$23 million (A$32 million) seed round for Constantinople that was led by Square Peg. Airtree Ventures also participated.
Constantinople is designed to be a fully-managed banking platform, encompassing the full spectrum of the banking infrastructure including customer experience, banking products, operations, servicing, compliance and anti-money laundering (AML).
"The way we describe our business is as a complete software and operational platform for banks," Duncan said, adding it could be used to support either retail or business banking operations.
Duncan said the platform can “free banks from operational complexity” and enable “them to focus on the things that actually matter to their customers and how they differentiate with their customers.”
The Constantinople team is now up to 60 staff, 48 of which sit in product engineering.
The platform uses proprietary software for the infrastructure layer, but also a “handful of third-party services” as well, Duncan said.
Duncan was bullish for the startups future growth prospects.
“We really envisage that in 10 years’ time, we could have 500 banks operating on top of one common set of software," he said.
Co-founder and co-CEO Di Challenor said moving into the US market is part of its next steps as Constantinople maps out its global strategy.
The banking platform could “open up a whole opportunity” for new banks to reach market quicker and free capital and time to focus on customers, she added.
“I think the biggest challenge in banking that we see is the amount of time and the amount of capital that goes into the operational activities of a bank, rather than being able to use that capital to lend or help people get into their homes or help people grow their businesses," she said.
