Blend Recognized in the 2024 Gartner® Market Guide for Digital Banking Platforms

Blend (NYSE: BLND), a leading provider of cloud banking services, today announced its recognition as a representative vendor in the 2024 Gartner Market Guide for Digital Banking Platforms.

Built with agility in mind, Blend's Builder Platform is designed to deliver innovative banking products with speed and scale by leveraging reusable components and best-in-class workflows to create differentiated borrower experiences. We believe this acknowledgment highlights Blend's commitment to driving rapid transformation in the banking sector.

According to Gartner's Market Guide, "A successful end-to-end digital banking platform enables banks to leverage a broader set of transaction types, new products and engagement models. It can create new revenue opportunities, reduce operating costs and enable banking transformation that stretches beyond just delivery channel transformation."

Problem statement

Differentiation in today's market is difficult. Consumer expectations are constantly evolving, yet financial institutions are still using legacy infrastructure developed decades ago, making deploying innovative new products difficult, expensive, and lengthy.

Blend Builder Platform

Built with agility in mind, Blend Builder is an omnichannel platform designed to serve customers across origination channels with a unified platform that synchronizes across all service and product delivery touchpoints. The Blend Builder Platform allows for rapid innovation and offers guided application flows, a responsive design, and data pre-fill to drive higher conversions.

Gartner's Market Guide also states, "Clients cite creating omnichannel as the top driver for investing in digital banking platforms, followed by delivering new customer experience capabilities and improving existing customer experience."

Key platform benefits

• Stand up new products quickly: Blend's Builder platform consists of prebuilt blocks that help reduce upfront development time. The blocks are also reusable, meaning you build them once and can use them across multiple products. Further, the prebuilt product templates for things like deposit accounts, credit cards, vehicle loans, personal loans, and home equity, financial institutions can stand up new solutions in record time.

• Iterate and update with ease: One of the biggest challenges of legacy infrastructure is making updates. Blend's Builder platform helps teams update and optimize tools quickly. It's what one expert refers to as "cohesive and decoupled:" The parts work together, but aren't dependent on one another. You can switch out individual pieces without breaking the entire workflow. Even more exciting is that published changes to a block are automatically pushed out to all the applications using it ? making it incredibly easy to make changes across multiple products.

• Increase cross-sell opportunities: Another very key aspect of Blend's platform technology is its ability to send and receive information. Applications built on the platform can share information, making it possible to do things like prefill applications, or prequalify people for additional products. This is very useful to increase cross-sell opportunities and can even help with things like loan utilization.

Additionally, using a single platform across multiple solutions eliminates the need to work with multiple vendors, simplifies and reduces training for bankers, and allows financial institutions to offer a consistent, holistic experience to their customers across all products and channels.

As stated in the Gartner Market Analysis, "Gartner conducted a targeted vendor survey to analyze the evolution and maturity of DBP (Digital Banking Platform) capabilities for this Market Guide. The survey included 27 participant vendors that Gartner believes broadly represent the global vendor landscape."

About Blend

Blend is the infrastructure powering the future of banking. Financial providers?from large banks, fintechs, and credit unions to community and independent mortgage banks?use Blend's platform to transform banking experiences for their customers. Blend powers billions of dollars in financial transactions every day. To learn more, visit blend.com.

About Gartner

Gartner, Market Guide for Digital Banking Platforms, Ali Merji, Jeff Casey, 20 May 2024
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