Blog: Is Your Bank Embracing these Key Mega Trends?

One of the most critical things any business can do to drive innovation is gather feedback directly from customers. It’s one of my favorite parts of the job—when we can get in front of our customers and discuss what’s working and what’s not, the things that are keeping them up at night, where they’re at in their digital transformations and more, we learn how to improve our own solutions. After all, innovation doesn’t happen in a vacuum, as the saying goes.

So much discovery takes place at these sessions, and this was especially true at our annual International Management Seminar (IMS), held recently in Lisbon, Portugal. We’ve been beating the drum of embracing connected commerce, which means meeting consumers wherever they are, however they want to engage, without channel-centric issues getting in the way of a positive experience. We were interested to get the pulse of the many international banking executives at the show, so we asked them to identify retail banking trends most important to them, based off a poll in The Financial Brand’s Retail Banking Trends Report.

The results of the voting were clear. Both IMS 2018 delegates, the Retail Banking Trends Report—from 2018 and the latest issue from January 2019—arrived at the same conclusions. The two current market trends the industry is prioritizing are …

• Improving customer journeys (for both internal cost/efficiency, and external client experience reasons)
• and maximizing the various benefits of big data and Artificial Intelligence (AI)

During the show, more than a dozen banking experts and thought leaders from the financial industry presented their company’s case studies and detailed insights on these trends. As a collective group, we identified four “mega trends” affecting our industry. You can read about all four in our latest whitepaper, but the two that resonated most with those present were:

• consumer evolution
• unbundling

It’s become crystal clear that consumers around the globe have irrefutably changed—and it’s imperative that our industry keep up with their changing behavior and demands. Customers of retail banks want and expect frictionless digital journeys that are supported by people whenever they need that support. Using AI and the masses of data they hold on their customers actively opens up the opportunity to infer information, which can be used to better understand their customers’ needs and concerns. In particular this improves bank’s sales and marketing activities by building convenient and individual consumer journeys. The executives assembled at the show found compelling evidence to support a customer-first transformation strategy.

New banking regulations such as PSD2 in the EU, Open Banking in the UK, NPP (New Payments Platform) in Australia and similar legislation in other countries are aimed at increasing competition in the banking industry, improving customer choice and experience and providing certain new protections. This opening-up of the banks’ domain will lead to the formation of new partnerships between players from both inside and outside of traditional banking, based on Open APIs.

Banks must consider the role they want to play in this new API-based world, how to take advantage of it and how to manage it.

Now you can explore the presentations, quotes and conversations that moved the needle! We’ve packaged the best parts of the seminar into an interactive, information-packed new whitepaper, “The Critical Change You Need to Make to Your Customer Engagement Strategy.” Inside you’ll find real-world advice from your peers in the banking industry, as well as action items you can implement today to start connecting more deeply with your consumers.

Download it today—and don’t wait to start a conversation with our banking transformation experts.