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Trends Revamping the BFSI Sector in the Wake of the Digital Revolution

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With over two decades of experience in the financial services sector, Rupa Ramamurthy, Sr EVP of Banking Operations at Teleperformance India, delves into some of the key trends which are transforming the BFSI landscape as customers demand agile experiences.

It would be an understatement to say that the past few years have been turbulent – the world has been through a pandemic, followed by a global economic crisis. As a result, we have undergone a pivotal change in the way in which we interact with our banks. 61% of customers now interact with their financial institutions through a digital channel on a weekly basis. The traditional Banking and Financial Services Industry (BFSI) has completely transformed, determined to win over customers. Digital banks are on a swift upwards trajectory – with challenger banks redefining the rules on customer experience, and Fintechs creating a new wave of app-based financial services. The traditional banks have truly stepped up their game in order to compete.

The shift to the digital is a natural disruptor that has been expected. However, against a backdrop of a challenging economy, let’s take a look at what we are seeing in the BFSI sector this year.

Legacy Banks Bounce Back

Rupa Ramamurthy

The year has started with mass layoffs amongst major tech firms, with an estimated 107,000 people in the sector losing their jobs in January 2023 alone. However, this has not been confined just to the big tech players. Many Fintech banks have also followed suit and cut back on staff as a cost-saving measure.

For a long time, the future of banking appeared to belong to trendy Fintechs. In order to compete, traditional banks have embraced digital transformation, as they begin to find their place within the everything-tech economy we live in today. We are seeing many close their physical branches to invest more in their digital capabilities, building effective online banking services such as apps, and focusing on meeting the needs of customers – who now choose digital touchpoints first and foremost.

As a result, the traditional banks are re-establishing themselves and focusing on agility. This consolidates their position amongst customers who expect their bank of choice to offer innovative and seamless digitally integrated solutions.

Anticipating Customer Needs

As challenger banks continue to emerge, and the playing field becomes more equal with legacy banks embracing digital transformation, companies need to ensure they prioritise their customer experience strategies in order to hang onto their customers. In fact, according to Gartner, 86% of banks already compete on a customer experience basis.

With the economic uncertainty playing on many customers’ minds, it is likely we will be seeing banks focusing on customer experience (CX) in order to anticipate their customers’ expectations and behaviours. This can be done by providing hyper-personalization, and drilling down into each customer’s individualised needs, such as specific alerts with financial advice, or informing them of their spending behaviour. By engaging with customers in a rich dialogue about their financial lives, banks can better anticipate their needs. These types of banking experiences will become imperative rather than just an added touch. According to research from the Boston Consulting Group, if done well, personalization at scale can lead to annual revenue uplifts of 10%.

The Rise of Chatbots

Hyper-personalization is fuelled through AI-powered chatbots. As branches close their doors and banking moves online, customer self-service is becoming increasingly popular. To provide agility, innovative solutions such as chatbots are emerging to assist humans and provide a seamless customer experience in banking. Gartner predicts that AI is now so prevalent in banking that 70% of customer interactions involve emerging technologies. Rather than waiting on the phone to speak with an agent, customers can be greeted by a chatbot who can deal with their issue promptly whilst providing personalization. Furthermore, they enable customers to have access to advice and support any time, anywhere, which will be valued highly in the rocky months ahead.

AI and chatbots are a huge sector for growth for the BFSI sector. Chatbot usage has increased by 200% since the pandemic, and the revenue of the banking AI industry will exceed 64 billion US dollars by 2030. Some companies are even accelerating their chatbots that one step further through AI, by leveraging sentiment analysis and emotion-detecting technology so that they can interact with customers in the most appropriate and impactful way.

Building a BFSI Academy for Trained Interaction Experts

We believe in creating unmatched experiences for all stakeholders, and in having a strategy that prioritises customer experiences. Companies like us are assisting banks in doing this, and through initiatives such as our BFSI Academy we are ensuring that there is a continuous pipeline of specialist talent to meet the needs of clients. By providing a training programme for the critical operations of banking, we are creating a talent pool of domain professionals. Having this pipeline means that clients can have access to extra resources as per demand, and brings speed and expertise to the more complex issues.

Many of the traditional banks are now outsourcing their customer experience capabilities to these trained interaction experts, who offer streamlined, secure and more cost-effective solutions. This includes CX and Back-Office services, such as onboarding, KYC and fraud prevention. These trained specialists act as a ‘plug and play’ of CX advisors, who are well-versed in using tailored resources built upon the latest technology, whilst simultaneously providing that underlying human empathy to provide millions of interactions to customers for financial transactions and vital customer support.

Agile Banking with Simpler, Faster, Safer Solutions

Driven by the demands for agile banking, and the need to humanize digital experiences, banking and financial institutions are now relying on these vested partners to outsource their CX and Back-Office services. Ultimately, customers still crave a human touch, and financial institutions need to carefully strike a balance between digitization and in-person experiences. Despite the growth in the digital, in this economic climate it is essential for customers to feel as if they are supported by their bank and can lean on them. Human touch is the key to this, and leveraging it will certainly be needed if banks want to hang on to their customers in the coming months.

This year, there is a compelling opportunity for the legacy banks. Personalized experiences are now imperative in the world of banking, and will be a defining trend set to shape the scene in the months to come. Steering digital capabilities towards agile delivery models which anticipate customer needs is what will allow banks to stay competitive in the economic downturn.

Each interaction matters, and it is now imperative for banks to implement a carefully crafted High-Tech, High-Touch approach where latest technology is combined with human empathy. This will define how banks can be agile and consistently meet customer needs, whilst challenging the new digital institutions – providing Simpler, Faster, Safer and Smarter solutions.

Banking

Digital Acceleration – the next buzzword in banking tech? Or a new era for the industry?

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By

Ove Kreison, CTO at Tuum

McKinsey’s latest report on banking found that traditional banks are spending a whopping 85% of their tech budgets on maintaining legacy solutions, with just 15% going towards building anything new for customers.

Digital transformation’ has been the buzzword in banking technology for years, but the figures suggest there’s still a lot of ‘transforming’ left to be desired. Now we’re beginning to see the term ‘digital acceleration’ come to the fore, what does that mean for the state of banking technology? What is the difference between acceleration and transformation, and what should banks and other financial services players do to remain competitive?

Digital transformation – the second machine age which has taken an age!

The idea of ‘digital transformation’ didn’t come out of the blue. Banking – like most other industries post-WW2 – has been experiencing the ‘second machine age’ for decades, exploring how technology can digitize processes and services to make cost, operational and organisational efficiencies. All the while, this process has also made it far easier for companies to be more competitive with new digital products that are slicker, quicker and more user-friendly.

Banks have benefited from wherever they have had digital transformation to date – but it is the digital transformation of core technology stacks that is having the most impact and making banks realise operational efficiencies while making them nimbler to adapt to changing customer needs and remain relevant and competitive in a highly disrupted market.  Digital transformation to the core gives banks the ability to launch new offerings to market quicker, renovate and modernize business models, leverage and analyse data from multiple systems taking innovation of the more exciting front-end and customer centric offerings to the next level.  Faster speed to market,  highly personalised offerings, more agile, more scalable.

Success and progress to date, however, has been slow. Traditional banks especially are lumbered with highly complex and costly core technology stacks. Digital transformation and upgrading these core stacks still remains a priority, but the next wave of digital acceleration is now an urgent priority on the c-suite agenda to ensure banks compete and survive in a rapidly evolving industry.

Digital Acceleration vs Digital Transformation

Digital transformation at its core takes the existing ways companies have run their business and applies new technologies to digitize them – for example, taking a paper-based application process and making it online.

Digital acceleration is different. Here, digital becomes the very core of the business model, creating further new digital processes. It gives the power to not just make existing processes digital but to reimagine how those processes impact and improve the business. Some of the most forward-thinking banks are already doing this. BBVA, the second biggest bank in Spain, is actively and openly seeking to become a software company in the future and has digital at the heart of its offering. It embraced open innovation and new technologies to better serve its customers – for example, it launched an app-based money transfer offering, Tuyyo, in 2017. It’s also exploring how technologies like blockchain can be used to transform fundamental banking services such as loan origination, with the aim of improving the way it runs its businesses.

Co-Value Creation – Going it Alone isn’t an Option

A core facet of digital acceleration – especially in a highly mature and saturated market like banking – will be how banks, fintechs, enterprises and others collaborate to mobilise these more diverse capabilities and expertise, bringing mutual benefits to all parties.

The pace of technological change is so hypercompetitive to the point now where organisations cannot always sustain their competitive advantage or ‘do it all’. Constantly updating your offering to maintain market share and react to new demands has become a necessity for banks, but it is exhausting. More and more banks and FS providers are realising that the strategic resources and capabilities needed to deliver these innovative services lie outside of their business, and given the fast pace of change, developing everything in-house is unrealistic given the skills gap, time and cost constraints. Moreover, tech advances around integration and APIs mean collaborating with third-party experts has never been easier or more effective to bring capabilities that, combined with their own core offerings and customer data, provide an important competitive advantage and valuable proposition for customers.

One brilliant example of this is ING. Recognising the struggles associated with traditionally manual and paper-intensive trade finance processes, it launched a blockchain-based commodities financing platfrom Komgo in 2018 with a consortium of other banks and corporates like Société Général, Citi, and Mercuria. In an age of hypercompetition – mutually beneficial collaboration is the answer.

Transform, accelerate, create

Ultimately, banks can continue to digitally transform while also looking to digitally accelerate. In fact, the two go hand in hand; in order to reap the benefits and be able to consider platform co-creation and digital acceleration, banks need to transform their tech stacks from the core to have the capability and agility to think beyond the realms of their own core business and their own technology. Those that get it right by driving innovation from the core, are reimagining their business models for the digital age, tapping into new revenue streams and becoming more customer-centric are not only more relevant now but future proofed for digital acceleration of the future.

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Banking

Banking on legacy – The risks posed by ‘stone age’ banking infrastructure

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By Andreas Wuchner, Angel Investor of Venari Security

 

Introduction

If you consider the most significant motivating factors behind cyber-attacks – the promise of large financial reward and the opportunity to cause maximum business and social disruption – it’s little wonder that banks and financial institutions are amongst the most inviting targets for would-be cyber criminals. In fact, according to IBM’s recent report, ‘banking and finance’ was the most attacked industry for the five years between 2015 and 2020 – surpassed only by threats to critical infrastructure in recent years. Successful attacks can provide aggressors with a mass of sensitive personal and financial information, and even access to people’s money itself. Furthermore, a suspension of withdrawals and deposits can cause huge social disruption and reputational damage. 

As banks have reacted to years of new regulation and emerging technologies, they often operate with a hugely complicated and disparate technology estates. This provides malicious actors with a wealth of potential attack vectors. A small breach from anywhere in this network can have enormous consequences, and lead to entire systems being overrun. As such, it’s crucial that security teams operate with the highest-grade security possible, including ensuring the strongest level of encryption standards. Banks need to look beyond regulatory tick-box commitments and ensure they are taking proactive and preventative steps to monitor and combat malicious attacks across their entire network.

Andreas Wuchner

However, the ability to react to cyber-threats across a vast estate requires speed and flexibility to quickly react and update security protocols. The sheer volume of legacy infrastructure slows this process down considerably leaving many security teams in a vicious cycle. 

 

The threat of legacy infrastructure

A sizeable proportion of the banking industry still maintains a reliance on systems first developed more than 40 years ago. In fact, many ‘core banking’ systems, like payments, loans, mortgages and the associated technologies, are still coded using COBOL (Common Business-Orientated Language), an otherwise defunct programming language that is older than the internet itself. In the UK and Europe, COBOL remains the ‘backbone of banking services,’ while in the USA, as much as 43% of banking systems are built on COBOL, meaning it underpins much of our financial system.

This presents a huge security risk. While code has been regularly updated over the years, these systems were built when security threats were far less sophisticated, less well-financed and the burden of data was far less pronounced. For several years, governments have pointed towards legacy systems, built using COBOL, as a major cybersecurity threat, incompatible with modern security best practices and solutions, including multi-factor authentication. For example, data from Kaspersky found that businesses with outdated technology are much more likely to have suffered a data breach (65%) than those who keep their technology updated (29%).

A further security consideration is the diminishing number of people who are trained in maintaining COBOL systems. Every year, experienced professionals exit the industry, making it increasingly difficult to service legacy technologies and creating significant delays in patching threats once they’re identified. This lack of supply of sufficiently trained experts, and the demand they face, makes any updates extremely expensive and time consuming.

Furthermore, legacy infrastructure is preventing the secure application of encryption, posing its own distinct cybersecurity and regulatory risks. Encryption is often heralded as a silver bullet solution for data privacy and has been a continuing area of focus for regulatory bodies in recent years. However, banks remain guilty of poor deployment, maintenance and management of encryption – using outdated protocols and inefficient methods of analysing and understanding network traffic. This, coupled with legacy ‘core banking’ systems that are incompatible with modern encryption techniques, equates to a regulatory and security headache for security teams.

 

Adopting a new mindset  

The risks posed by legacy systems and the volume of cybersecurity threats facing banks, mean a concentrated re-think of overall cybersecurity strategy is needed to prevent breaches and ensure data is protected long-term. Traditionally, banks have taken an ‘outside-in’ view – dedicating capacity, finances and knowledge to dealing with threats that are existing, known and well publicised. However, to aid long-term security, this should be superseded by an ‘inside-out’ proactive approach, whereby security teams are cognisant of their own internal systems and where the key vulnerabilities are found. Once banks have a detailed view of the security risks posed by their legacy systems, and specifically what data is threatened, they can address flaws, update these systems and build a stronger overall security posture.

 

The secure path ahead

Many of our successful high-street banks today have centuries of experience in dealing with social, economic and regulatory upheaval. However, the rapid development and deployment of technology continues to present a unique challenge. Many ‘traditional’ banks have built a complex technology infrastructure through decades of adjustment to new legislation and emerging technologies. While serviceable in the past, fintech start-ups are pushing the long-term viability of these systems to the limit.

Challenger banks have the luxury of being built from the ground-up, prioritising convenient digital services and features, and modern security processes. As the user base of these banks increase, customers are increasingly expecting these features and security from their existing banks, meaning even more complexity added to legacy infrastructures. As outlined by Deloitte, existing firms simply aren’t positioned to support the rising expectation of the market, exposing banks to additional risk and liability.

What’s more, it’s estimated that banks spend as much as 80% of their yearly IT budgets on the maintenance of legacy systems. While an immediate switch away from these systems is unrealistic, there is an opportunity to reduce wasted spend and divert spend towards modernisation efforts. However, while traditional banks may want to adapt quicker to technological advancements, they need to do so while continuing to minimise cyber risk and without jeopardising the security of their data or systems. This means placing cybersecurity at the heart of any modernisation efforts and maintaining a steady rate of change. As more of the technology estate begins to be modernised, the potential risks of regulatory non-compliance will also reduce.

 

Legacy systems need a considered update

Banking systems have heavily relied on legacy infrastructure for too long now, bringing difficulties in maintaining the highest-grade cybersecurity and in facilitating innovation. The risks presented by novel cybersecurity attack vectors and competition from new and emerging digital services offered by challenger banks are exacerbating these issues. As such, legacy systems need a managed modernisation in the long-term, facilitated in part by a managed redistribution of existing IT spend. However, to ensure long-term security overall, cybersecurity needs to be central to be at the very heart of modernisation efforts.

 

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