Build vs Buy Trust Frameworks: Which option is best? - Raidiam

Liz Crews, Raidiam’s Sales Director, looks at the build vs buy situation facing organisations looking to implement Trust Frameworks.

Experts are called experts for a reason. Some things are best left to the experts.

At Raidiam we deliver trust – we provide our clients with capabilities to share, or enable others to share, consented data, safely and securely. From regulators implementing national initiatives such as Open Finance to individual enterprises wanting to provide sophisticated onboarding or new product lines for customers, Raidiam’s platform is designed to serve numerous use cases. 

All Open Banking and Open Finance ecosystems currently in operation – or soon to go live – are built using Raidiam’s secure Trust Framework foundation. No market has found a way to achieve the same level of security by any other means. The provision of key technical functionality like a Trust Framework via a SaaS model is quite common, and is how we have delivered every implementation that we have been involved in.

Raidiam Connect underpins a fully functioning data sharing ecosystem. The platform implements the Trust Framework, which is the necessary foundation for any form of data sharing. As its name suggests, its purpose is to establish ‘trust’ and this is done through a combination of technology, standards and rules. It manages the essential functionality that guarantees the security of the ecosystem, without which the ecosystem simply can’t be maintained.  

We are aware of banks and other enterprises who have attempted to build a Trust Framework themselves; they have talented IT teams and recruitment plans to bring additional expertise in-house. But repeatedly it’s the case that several years on and tens of millions of pounds later, they’re still struggling to create what the business is calling for. 

To build or to buy? The questions to consider

So, if you are wrestling with the question of whether to build this yourself or buy an off the shelf solution, ask yourself three questions.

1. Do you have confidence that you can deliver this on time and on budget?
2. Do you possess the experience to navigate around any issues that might crop up?
3. Most importantly, are your resources best spent working on other – more differentiating – things?

Why you should leave Trust Frameworks to the experts

People may initially baulk at the thought of having critical infrastructure for their business or regulatory mandate provided on this basis but there are several reasons why it makes more sense than battling it out in-house. Some things you do need to leave to the experts: 

• We are the global experts at this – it’s what we’ve been doing day in, day out, for over seven years. Raidiam Connect is specifically designed for hyper-scale, performance and availability as a fully integrated solution. There is no one else with our level of experience and such a comprehensive team of specialist professionals. Others may try to claim they do but they’d have trouble proving it. 

• You can put a price on security – when it comes to security, particularly involving sensitive data, corners should never be cut. You will not find a more secure way of managing the accessing and sharing of data and the participation of TPPs than our platform, which is built on the global gold standard Financial-grade API (FAPI) profile from the OpenID Foundation. 
  
• We enable – we are confident it would be impossible for an organisation to start from scratch and build an equivalent product in a timescale anywhere near what would be needed or at an acceptable level of cost. Tackling such a build in-house could cause significant delays to pushing forward with policy implementations or strategic innovation. 
  
• We deliver, again, and again – based on our own development cycle, we know how much effort and what resources are required to simply maintain a Trust Framework product. We also know the effort required to add in additional functionality to meet new requirements and scalability and are practised at delivering this. For non-experts, managing and resourcing this in-house becomes quickly becomes unsustainable. 

Want to find out more? Get in touch and I’ll happily tell you more about how our capabilities simply can’t be matched for delivering your ambitions.

Liz Crews is Sales Director at Raidiam. She heads up the sales function, taking the lead with clients to ensure that the Raidiam Connect Trust Platform meets all their digital identity and B2B objectives.