Banks were early adopters of digital advances, but being frontrunners in financial technology has created unique challenges for banks, especially as agile fintechs flood the field, equipped with innovation without legacy infrastructure. Will banks be consigned to the backfield, or can they exploit their enviable assets to best advantage?
The 1990s decade is known for many achievements, but possibly the most tectonic was the advent of the internet and, along with it, numerous web-based tech companies. In a short space of time, the IPOs of these emerging companies soared on the NASDAQ Composite Index, only to crash equally spectacularly during the year 2000. What happened?
If anything prompted agility, it was the pandemic. Most banks surprised themselves by how agilely they responded to the immense changes required in record speed. Celent’s Model Bank virtual event brought banking professionals together to discuss the importance of agility in banking, what makes a bank agile and how it can become more agile.
Equities across most of the major Asia-Pacific (APAC) markets encountered massive sell-off on Tuesday, 11 May, following the downbeat Wall Street with the tech-heavy benchmark Nasdaq Composite sliding more than 2.5 per cent. Led by the heavy drop in the blue-chip technology stocks, including Apple, Tesla, Facebook, Amazon, Alphabet, Netflix, Nvidia, Microsoft, and Paypal, the Nasdaq Composite suffered a loss of 350.38 points, or 2.55 per cent to close at 13,401.86 on 10 May.
COVID-19 has brought the centrality of the banking industry within the financial sector into sharper focus. Banks’ roles in shepherding their economies through the troubling times of the pandemic and beyond are indisputable; how well they fulfil their mandates will determine the success of the broader recovery in Europe and elsewhere. The road won’t be easy, and the banking sector needs to redefine and restructure itself to meet these challenges. Bank boards will have to take a more prominent role in this process.
As COVID-19 continues to transform our daily lives in significant ways, traditional banking models have come under intense pressure. Technology is facilitating a rapidly evolving landscape for financial services, with the execution of financial transactions no longer solely under the stewardship of conventional financial institutions.
As the world becomes more digitally intertwined, competition between its major economies grows more combative, as evidenced by the US-China trade battles and legal actions. No sector is more impacted than frontline information and communications technology, in which much of today’s warfare between the two heavyweights rages. At the inception of a new year and a new decade, is there reason to hope for cooperation toward shared growth and prosperity?
There are times when no one wants to see history repeat itself, and that’s the case among today’s investors in technology stocks. Some fear that the dot-com bubble burst of 2000 may repeat itself 20 years later. Although some tech stocks may be overvalued, the flourishing Fourth Industrial Revolution displays no signs of running out of steam any time soon. Caution is advised but not panic.
Credit cards have become as much a part of our financial lives as checking accounts. For some, being approved for an unsecured credit card is out of reach for a variety of reasons. People with challenging credit situations are turning to secured credit cards as an avenue to achieve credit-worthiness, with attaining unsecured credit as the ultimate goal. What are the factors that expedite graduation from secured to unsecured credit?
There are enough new terms floating around banking to make one’s head spin, and along comes greenfield bank. This refers to the growing trend among incumbent banks to create standalone digital banks that are as agile and innovative as the fintechs and neobanks. After considering how difficult and expensive it is proving to be for banks to break out of their legacy-infrastructure moulds, this approach makes a lot of sense.