Link
Spearheading Digital Transformation in the Finance World

Digitalization is the name of the game in the finance sector for the last two decades. And this has brought a host of issues that exasperate financial institutions. As they struggle to handle on-premises back-office operations and legacy cloud applications, financial organizations are increasingly turning to automation to manage them in an optimized manner. Yet, a lack of integrated visibility into the entire enterprise architecture hampers the optimization process. And as banks increasingly expose their client-facing interfaces through websites and mobile apps, security breaches are also becoming a rising concern.

In one fell swoop, Lisbon-based Link Consulting wipes away the digitalization worries of banks and other financial institutions. The IT services company delivers technology innovation to the financial, banking, and insurance sectors. Link comes with a strong background in research as a spin-out of a startup from INESC, a leading Portuguese IT research institute. "We solve the complex problems that clients face by leveraging our engineering capabilities and IT solutions," says José Alves Marques, CEO of Link Consulting.

Equipped with a team of top-level IT engineers, Link caters to financial organizations of all sizes, helping them handle the complexities of cloud management and integrating their security mechanisms. Link's cutting-edge IT solutions play a massive role in quickening the pace of the digitalization of financial institutions.

To that end, Link has developed automation tools and a conceptual digital factory to further improve the digital processes and optimize the back-office operations for banks and financial organizations.

Link's customizable, AI-enabled Bank-on-Box product facilitates personalized digital client-facing interfaces for banks. With out-of-box functionality and multiple security layers, Bank-on-Box integrates with the back offices of banks to make their digital channels robust. This enables them to not only digitally interact with customers in real-time but also allows online account opening and customer authentication.
Pushed by a rapidly proliferating cloud infrastructure owing to digitalization, financial institutions find themselves enmeshed in a highly complex IT landscape. Addressing their need to manage their increasingly complex IT architecture is Link's Atlas product. Atlas organizes and streamlines the intricate landscape of cloud applications and the IT infrastructure of financial organizations undergoing digital transformations. By collecting information from various internal and external sources like their IT infrastructure, enterprise services, APIs, and cloud providers, Atlas provides a detailed and integrated view of the complete IT architecture of the organization. This enables visibility into the organization's current status, its assets and liabilities, the impact of its services, and possible organizational issues that might arise in the future.

Apart from large banks and financial organizations, Link is increasingly involving itself in resolving issues related to IT architecture management and investment banking for small to medium enterprises (SMEs) engaged in financial services. These SMEs, Marques informs, have been relying heavily on time-consuming methods of utilizing personal contacts and human resources for client interactions. They wanted to build digital channels for client-facing interactions without overhauling their internal applications. Link made this possible for them by deploying tech solutions that quickly and seamlessly integrated with their back offices, thereby digitalizing their client-facing interfaces. "We have several of such use cases in Portugal, Africa and the Middle East," notes Marques.

Today, apart from Portugal, Link has operations in Brazil, Switzerland, Ghana, and several other European, Middle Eastern, and African countries. In the coming days, Link is looking forward to global expansions in these regions. Also on Link's roadmap are acquisitions of promising technologies and collaborations with universities, research centers and startups in Lisbon that will transform enterprises' business processes and augment tomorrow's IT landscape. With a goal to internationalize its solutions and activities, Link would steadily continue on its journey to spearhead digital transformation for organizations worldwide.