Narmi Functions: The Easiest Way to Extend Narmi’s Banking Platform

At Narmi, we are dedicated to building the best digital banking platform for financial institutions. To continue raising the bar on what it means to be an open platform, we are constantly working to put more power in the hands of financial institutions. That means giving them the agency to innovate what they want, when they want, and how they want. 

Why We Built Narmi Functions

Since our founding Narmi has invested heavily in openness, building a strong foundation with our Open Platform, the Narmi Application Framework (NAF),  the AppXchange, and the Narmi API.  We know that giving financial institutions the ability to customize and build on top of their digital platforms is essential to helping them create a best-in-class user experience and rapidly adapt to changing expectations from employees and users.

However, many financial institutions struggle to fully leverage these tools due to having limited internal technical resources and the challenge of hosting.

Narmi Functions solves these problems, freeing up financial institutions to respond to inefficient and repetitive tasks themselves. Financial institutions can now create bespoke features, custom integrations, and back-office automations on their own time and without the hassle of managing infrastructure. Critically, Narmi Functions also solves the challenge of hosting by allowing Narmi to host these new technologies, relieving financial institutions of that ongoing commitment.

By utilizing Narmi Functions in tandem with Narmi’s Open Platform tools, our financial institution customers can continue to stay ahead of the innovation curve and extend their platforms while maintaining the seamless UX users are used to across their main digital platforms. 

What financial institutions can build with Narmi Functions

When it comes to Narmi Functions, your imagination is the limit. We designed Narmi Functions with the capability to leverage any event that happens on the banking platform, serving as a potential "trigger. Being able to utilize these events means financial institutions can build custom systems for their staff and engage their user base more effectively. From letting your support staff know that a new high-value account has been opened to giving users a unique insight into their financial health, to hosting Narmi Application Framework (NAF) applications you’ve built or plan on building, this plug-and-play tool can open the doors to previously untapped creativity.

Some of the most popular use cases include:

Notify your staff of a canceled or abandoned application: Instead of assigning a team member to periodically look at the Staff Application for account applications that have been canceled or abandoned, a Narmi Function can send a Slack or Microsoft Teams notification to your workspace to speed up recovery of that application.

Notify your staff of a wire that needs review: Many financial institutions need to check for suspicious wires and manually review them to mitigate fraud. Narmi Functions can send a Slack or Microsoft Teams notification to your workspace instead, alerting a team member when a wire needs manual review.‍

Connect your marketing platform and send timely communications: Financial institutions want to connect with their users to encourage them to engage with the banking platform, or continue signing up for a new bank account. Narmi Functions can connect with your CRM system (Mailchimp, Hubspot, and more), and send new users a marketing email whenever they open up a new account.

How Narmi Functions Works

Easily accessible via the Staff Admin portal, Narmi Functions packages all of the engineering building blocks of Narmi’s Open Architecture in what we call a Function, a single-purpose block of code that can be used to execute custom tasks in your digital banking platform. This special architecture gives a financial institution all the benefits of customizing its platform without the hassle of building or managing the infrastructure. 

Depending on the technical knowledge at your financial institution, we’ve provided various ways to take advantage of Narmi Functions, from using a pre-built template, building a Function by scratch, or using Narmi Functions to host an application you built on the NAF. So, what is the impact of Narmi Functions? 

Narmi Functions eliminates key barriers to innovation

Typically, financial institutions would need an engineer to manually set up the engineering infrastructure to begin building an extension to the platform, including connecting to the cloud and the Narmi API. However, Narmi Functions pre-packages those pieces together, reducing the time needed to get set up from weeks to minutes. And as we mentioned, the pre-built templates are built to give non-technical individuals the ability to extend the platform, saving financial institutions money where engaging an agency might not be necessary. 

Narmi Functions allows financial institutions partnership flexibility

Before Narmi Functions, a financial institution needed to do additional due diligence to make sure a third-party agency contracted to help build an extension met the same safety and security standards as the financial institution and Narmi itself. However, when Narmi hosts these integrations, this burden is removed, allowing the FI to simply engage their chosen agency through a conventional professional services agreement. 

Narmi now hosts extensions built on Narmi Functions

All extensions to Narmi's platform need to be hosted somewhere.  While financial institutions have a variety of capabilities that delight and grow their customer base, hosting software can be cumbersome and frustrating to manage on an ongoing basis. 

Furthermore, many external development agencies are glad to write code but often view building and managing infrastructure as a non-starter.  While some third parties are willing to host and manage infrastructure, partnering with these agencies typically requires a significant amount of legal and compliance diligence–a burden that supersedes the expected value from the platform extension. 

Narmi can now host the technology built by Narmi Functions and any apps built on the Narmi Application Framework (NAF). This means that neither the financial institution or the external agency a financial institution works with needs to take on the ongoing responsibility of managing the technology, freeing up those resources to focus on building the technology and serving the financial institutions’ users. 

The Future of the Product 

Narmi Functions will fundamentally change how you view extending your platform, and this is just the beginning. As the product continues to mature, our library of pre-built templates will grow, making it exponentially easier for you and your staff to extend your banking platform with just the click of a button. 

If you’re ready to build your first Function, visit the Developer Documentation to get started, contact your GM, or schedule a demo to see it in action.