Digital Transformation and the Bank of the Future

The banking sector is facing tough challenges. The much larger burden of regulation compared with ten years ago has increased costs by forcing the banks to grow their compliance headcount and spend money adapting IT systems to capture and make sense of the new information that regulators want.

For retail and commercial banks, low interest rates in many countries are keeping loan margins thin. Meanwhile, FinTech businesses are eating into banks’ market share by offering various banking products, including payment services, loans and wealth management, at highly competitive rates.

Major tech firms with deep pockets — such as Google, Amazon, Facebook and Apple — are also encroaching onto banks’ territory, by offering similar products to the FinTech upstarts. Banks can cope with these pressures and realize new opportunities by embracing automation and advanced digital technologies.

At the same time, customer expectations have also become more demanding. A new generation of well-educated and informed customers is taking over. These changing bank customers want a higher-quality and more personalized service, and they want it quicker and whenever or however it’s convenient to them. They expect to access a wide range of services seamlessly on their preferred channel, whether that is online, by smartphone or in brick-and-mortar branches.

In turn, banks are having to facilitate these new functionalities on legacy systems designed for the era of pre-digital banking – and they having to compete with FinTech businesses and global digital players with state-of-the-art systems that can be scaled up quickly and cheaply.

However, banks can cope with these pressures and realize new opportunities by embracing automation and advanced digital technologies, including Artificial Intelligence (AI), Natural Language Processing (NLP), Robotic Process Automation (RPA) and One Touch Processing.

This White Paper looks in detail at how these technologies are transforming the ways banks operate. It considers the huge process improvements that can be achieved by automating manual tasks; how digital technology can help banks cope with regulatory demands, as well as the crucial cost savings that can be made through digitalization.

Finally, it looks at how automation can improve the customer experience. Increasing efficiency and rationalizing the cost base are important strategies, but it is equally important that banks re-focus their resources and human capital to optimize the way they serve and interact with customers. In the new environment it is the only way to win.

Category: Fintech