The promise of technology-driven banking and financial services

In my previous blog, I looked at how the rise of FinTech startups has sparked a trend of banking and financial services organisations investing in digital transformation.

Many financial institutions are on the path to digital adoption to meet new age demands. It is always an eye-opener for me to understand what digital transformation means to each one of us and how we are individually using technology to create that digital financial organisation with a human touch.

The digital transformation of finance

To Standard Chartered, digital transformation is about much more than just technology, it is about changing the way the company works and satisfies the needs of its customers. In the constantly changing digital world, it is important for them to learn new innovations and partner with companies rather than compete, to provide new solutions and experiences.

To this end, they are investing heavily in Blockchain applications in trade, artificial intelligence for better scanning of paper documents or scrubbing the internet to know the customer better as well as machine learning for analysis of internal accounts to optimise liquidity management or risk assessment.

So, whether you are exploring Blockchain applications in trade, AI and machine learning for customer intelligence, security measures for detecting network intrusions, or video and chatbots as efficient helpdesks, you need a strong partner who can understand your needs and walk with you to the finish line.

This is just the beginning

The revolution has just begun. According to the 2017 innovation in retail banking research report, the biggest threat to financial services industry is keeping up with increasingly demanding consumers, integrating new technologies and using advanced data analytics to provide predictive recommendations.  I am sure that resonates, but keeping up with technology innovations is not easy.

Cyber insecurity, cost pressures, regulatory mandates, as well as next-gen platform and process changes resulting from new technology, are just a few challenges. The challenge is not only to understand the technology-driven influencers that will shape competition and create that agility and responsiveness to address them but also compete with new, aggressive, non-traditional innovators.

Your top priorities could be to transform core back-end processes and enrich customer experiences. If you are asking yourself – how do I do this? How do I drive business growth and efficiencies at the same time? Your simple answer is to tap into key partnerships.

Find the strategic partner who understands the importance of innovation, digitisation and the future of technology in your financial mix. How is your company moving to digital transformation? Write to us and share your stories. And watch this space for my next blog in the series.

Read another Future Forward blog and learn about other perspectives on the industry here.