Fintech contact centers need a strategic play, not another tool
John Can Karayel
Principal, CX Application Strategy
Key takeaways
- Fintech customer experience (CX) can fail without real-time orchestration between contact center systems, transaction data and risk platforms. Modern tools alone don’t solve this problem.
- Three strategic plays shape fintech contact center architecture: unified platforms, enterprise hubs and composable stacks. Each has distinct trade-offs in cost, control and complexity.
- The right architecture choice for your business depends on your engineering capacity, growth stage and product roadmap. The wrong choice could lead to costly and lengthy rework.
- Orchestrated systems enable human agents with access to live transaction states and financial data, potentially resulting in improved first contact resolution rates.
Most fintech contact centers don't lack technology. They lack a unifying, strategic play.
With the best intentions, fintech leaders often add new tools to their tech stacks in an attempt to solve queue problems, unlock new channels or pilot AI. Unfortunately, without proper orchestration, this can lead to fragmented agent experiences, duplicated and inconsistent data, underutilized systems and AI layered on top of broken foundations.
Insufficient or absent orchestration can be costly. According to a survey of over 3,700 senior executives and employees conducted by WalkMe for their The State of Digital Adoption 2025 report, enterprises lost over $104 million in 2024 alone due to underused tech. Meanwhile, Zendesk research reveals that 60% of agents cite that a lack of consumer data and context often causes negative experiences.
Too often, this results in customers reaching out with the same messages: 'My transfer is stuck.' 'My card declined.' 'Where's my refund?' These are expressions of financial uncertainty, not generic service questions, and they can only be resolved through real-time access to transaction states, fraud triggers and settlement workflows.
A strategic play — the foundational architecture that determines how your systems connect and scale — prevents fragmentation and aligns tooling with your product roadmap. Understanding which play fits your fintech business determines whether you scale efficiently or spend years in costly rework.
This article walks through three strategic plays for contact center orchestration and the capabilities every fintech stack must deliver. Throughout, in the form of strategic interventions, I'll highlight how TELUS Digital's CX consulting practice helps fintechs bridge the orchestration gap.
About the author
John Can Karayel has worked across fintech as an operator, investor and advisor in cross-border payments, lending and venture debt.
Why fintech contact centers fail without real-time orchestration
Fintech customer support is uniquely constrained by live financial states, compliance rules, sanctions logic and corridor-specific payment behaviors. For example, a transaction can be "pending," "held," "screened," "reversed," "reprocessing" or "settled," and each of these states may originate in different systems that do not refresh at the same cadence.
On top of these constraints, support teams are expected to switch channels relentlessly. In-app chat generates high volumes of routine questions. Voice calls escalate to fraud, chargebacks, AML investigations and urgent transfers. WhatsApp and SMS serve global customers across time zones. Email handles complex disputes. Each channel requires different context, tone and urgency — and the human agents who make up your support team must manage them all.
Underlying all of this is a structural problem: Each core system tells only part of the story. Without orchestration, agents assemble fragments manually and customers are asked to repeat problems that originated inside the company's own tooling. This raises both customer effort and agent effort.
Strategic intervention
Many CX strategies fail because the CRM or enterprise resource planning system can't support the vision. This is the orchestration gap.
Time and again, I've watched fintechs build ambitious CX roadmaps without first validating whether their infrastructure can execute them. The gap often emerges when teams try to route based on real-time transaction states or surface fraud flags during live interactions — capabilities that require deeper integration than standard platform configurations provide.
That's why tech stack audits are essential before committing to a strategy.
When we assess whether your infrastructure can actually deliver on your roadmap, we identify gaps before they derail execution. And when the platform can't support the vision, we design the orchestration layer that makes it possible.
Three strategic plays for fintech contact center architecture
Every fintech eventually selects one of three structural patterns for its contact center technology stack. Each one, which we call a "play," has a distinct philosophy, operating model, cost profile and level of control. The wrong choice can lead to years of rework, while the right choice can support rapid growth across markets and transaction volumes.
So how do you choose what's best for your business?
Compare the three strategic plays to determine which architecture fits your fintech's growth stage and technical capabilities. Play 1: The unified platform consolidates support into one vendor ecosystem
This strategy prioritizes speed, simplicity and cost efficiency by running support on a single, all-in-one platform. Ticketing, chat, knowledge and contact center AI live in one system with minimal integration overhead.
This play works well for fintechs with relatively straightforward support needs, where fast iteration and low total cost of ownership matter more than deep specialization.
Strategy: A single platform powers ticketing, chat, workflow, knowledge base and AI. This strategy consolidates nearly all support activity into one vendor ecosystem.
Business implications: Organizations using this play can scale their capabilities quickly in early-to-mid growth stages, ultimately benefiting from unified reporting and low operational burden.
The trade-off: As voice volume, regulatory requirements and global routing increase, teams may hit the limits of a one-size-fits-all platform and face vendor lock-in.
Play 2: The enterprise hub combines a specialized CCaaS solution with an enterprise CRM
Here, organizations anchor their operations around a best-in-class Contact Center as a Service (CCaaS) platform for complex routing and voice while using an enterprise CRM as the system of record. Middleware stitches everything together.
This model is common among large, global fintechs operating high-volume, voice-heavy environments with strict compliance and workforce management needs.
Strategy: A hub integrates a specialized CCaaS solution for voice and routing with an enterprise CRM. This strategy embraces specialization: The CCaaS handles routing and interactions, while the CRM serves as the system of record for customer accounts and history.
Business implications: This play supports heavy global volume, workforce forecasting and full 360° views of the customer across platforms.
The trade-off: While powerful, this approach can introduce significant cost and operational drag. Feature bloat, low agent adoption, brittle integrations and slow change cycles can surface when the stack outpaces the organization's ability to govern and operate it effectively.
Strategic intervention
Working with fintech teams, I consistently see this pattern: organizations invest heavily in best-in-class CCaaS and CRM platforms, but lack the integration capability to make them work together.
This isn't just anecdotal. According to Genysys' The State of Customer Experience research, while 86% of CX leaders say omnichannel experiences are critical, only 16% say their organizations have fully integrated solutions that connect data across channels.
The solution is building integrations using each platform's native tools, not custom code that breaks with every vendor update. When we deploy and customize these technologies to work seamlessly together, infrastructure stays stable as you scale. The alternative is brittle "spaghetti code" integrations that require constant maintenance and create new bottlenecks with each platform upgrade.
Play 3: The composable stack builds custom agent experiences on API-first infrastructure
With this play, the contact center becomes a product. API-first platforms act as scaffolding, while internal tools, product data and specialized AI are deeply embedded into the support experience.
This strategy enables unparalleled control and differentiation, often creating a competitive moat where CX is tightly woven into the core fintech product.
Strategy: A composable stack leverages an API-first approach where the fintech company builds its own custom agent experience using infrastructure APIs from external providers.
Business implications: Organizations using this play gain control through proprietary tooling, deep product integration and a competitive moat.
The trade-off: Composable stacks demand sustained engineering investment, longer build times and strong technical leadership. Success depends less on vendors and more on access to talent and operating maturity.
The composable stack requires cloud infrastructure that can scale instantly and respond in milliseconds. This is nearly impossible without modernizing legacy systems.
According to McKinsey research, roughly 70% of digital transformation initiatives fail to meet their strategic goals, largely because organizations underestimate implementation complexity and how technologies must work together. Legacy architectures simply can't support the API-first operations that composable stacks demand, resulting in slow response times, failed integrations and infrastructure that becomes the bottleneck.
For fintechs specifically, latency means friction. Fraud checks must be instant. Transaction spikes can't slow operations. That's why we help our fintech clients build cloud foundations where speed and scalability support real-time needs.
Four foundational capabilities every fintech contact center must deliver
Regardless of which strategic play you choose, your contact center must deliver four foundational capabilities. These capabilities determine whether your agents can resolve financial uncertainty in real time, or force customers to wait while systems catch up.
The chart below maps how each capability supports your CX maturity.
Review how four pillars support today's effective fintech contact centers. 1. Smart entry and routing delivers context before the conversation starts
Every second counts when money is stuck or fraud is suspected, which is why static IVRs and queue-based logic no longer meet customer expectations. Modern support systems must identify who is calling and why before the conversation even begins, using real-time identity, transaction status and risk signals to route each interaction. Intelligent routing should determine priority, channel and expertise with the same rigor as a risk engine (which evaluates fraud and transaction risk), matching the right customer to the right agent at the right moment.
2. Context persistence minimizes customer effort across channels
Trust erodes when systems lack empathy, forcing customers to repeat themselves across channels. Identity, account state and previous troubleshooting must follow the customer automatically across channels and hand-offs. True context isn't a static customer profile, but rather live ledger data, KYC status, fraud flags and dispute history surfaced in every interaction, regardless of channel.
Strategic intervention
In fintech, personalization depends on context — and context depends on orchestration.
Across the fintechs I've worked with, I've seen the same problem surface repeatedly: agents lack access to the data they need in the moment they need it.
Ledger states, risk flags and recent interactions live in separate systems, forcing agents to toggle between screens or ask customers to repeat themselves.
To win the moments that matter, fintechs must unify customer data across systems. When we aggregate ledger data, risk history and recent interactions into a single view, agents can understand customer intent before the conversation even begins. This same data foundation also powers CX AI and predictive churn modeling, enabling fintechs to turn fragmented data into strategic advantage.
3. Agent experience depends on orchestrating transaction, fraud and compliance data
Agents safeguard both compliance and customer confidence. They need risk triggers, settlement timelines and device data consolidated in one workspace with contextual guidance built in. When agents must investigate across multiple systems to answer a single question, the company has likely already lost time, money and regulatory credibility.
4. Feedback integration drives product and fraud prevention improvements
Support issues are symptoms of product problems that already exist. Modern fintechs prevent these symptoms by automatically feeding every dispute, failed transaction and authentication breakdown into fraud models, product backlogs and policy updates, instead of tracking them passively in dashboards.
Strategic intervention
When agents struggle, it's usually a process failure, not a personnel failure.
In my work with fintechs, I've seen this pattern repeatedly. Too often, agents are forced into manual workarounds because the tech stack can't support broken processes.
Process re-engineering is essential to identify operational bottlenecks before layering in technology. For instance, we recently helped a fintech client use AI-powered quality insights to transform agent coaching, moving from reactive feedback to predictive performance management.
Four steps to diagnose your orchestration gaps and choose your strategic play
Most fintechs know their contact center has gaps, but they don't know where to start.
Before investing in new platforms or integrations, progress through the following steps:
- Diagnose one high-friction journey: A good place to start could be transfers, identity verification or card declines.
- Map the actual system behavior from end-to-end: Trace how ledger, risk, KYC, CCaaS, CRM and product events interact throughout the customer journey.
- Choose your strategic play: Make an intentional choice based on your product roadmap, not your tooling wish list.
- Define your orchestration layer: Determine which systems need to share identity, transaction state and risk context in real time.
Get expert guidance on fintech contact center orchestration and tech stack selection
Throughout my career in fintech, I've observed that companies don't necessarily lose customer trust because support is slow. They lose trust when customers sense the company doesn't understand what's happening with their money. And that uncertainty stems from a gap in orchestration, not a gap in tooling.
The solution isn't another platform. It's choosing the right strategic play, building the infrastructure and accessing the right expertise to support it.
My team at TELUS Digital works with fintechs to navigate exactly this complexity — diagnosing where systems break, choosing the right architecture and implementing orchestration that works. When you get this right, CX becomes what customers assumed it already was: a seamless, real-time extension of the financial product itself.
Get in touch today to see how TELUS Digital can help you make the right strategic play.
