A customer in the center – the hottest topic of the 12th Global Banking Innovation Forum

Digitalization, innovation, open banking - these were the top topics spoken and discussed during 2-day 12th Global Banking Innovation Forum conference. Over 300 delegates from both banks and solution providers from Europe, Africa and Asia met to exchange their best practice how they respond to current trends in digitalization, innovation as well as change in law. What are the current challenges for bank, what are the opportunities and how they managed to respond to the especially in the era of COVID-19?

Digitalization – how digitalized are banks, how did they respond to rapid shift to online reality caused by COVID-19? As one presenter said, now it is not a time to go digital, banks should have started doing it few years ago, today they need to excel their digital presence, innovate and focus on building great customer experience. Customers want to things themselves. As it was said by one banker, customers are ready for digitalization, but some companies are not. We are talking about 0-click and online services, – 100% digitalization is what customers are expecting. They search for help with bank only is some process is not understood, so this process need to be rethought and change in understandable way for customer so he/she could thing himself/herself.

So what is a strategy for innovation for bank? There is a great shift of banking platforms to BAAS (Bank -As-A-Service), where using open banking opportunity and cooperation with fintech – bank can create great ecosystem of great number of services for its customers offered by both bank and its partners. Bank needs to act agile and optimize its processes fast, bearing in mind its customer personalized experience. That is a focus of the banks for today.