No one can deny that around the world, bank branches are shutting their doors, alarming consumer advocates. But who is mainly behind the trend away from brick and mortar and toward digital? As research proves, the prime mover is the customer, whose changing demands and expectations are causing the shift. Fortunately, today’s two main banking channels are not mutually exclusive; they can work successfully in tandem.
Although the GDPR—designed to augment consumers’ data protection and privacy—is the brainchild of the Council of the European Union and European Parliament, its reach extends far beyond Europe. In the United States, it is no longer a choice but a must for financial firms to adopt stricter consumer-data-protection measures. The costs of not doing so far outweigh the costs of compliance; regulators expect data security, and so do customers.
Banks are supposed to put up sturdy walls to protect the sensitive financial information that they closely guard, but sometimes these silos work to the benefit of the fraudsters intent on breaking in and stealing it. When bank teams work together, they present a much stronger unified barrier against cyber-criminals. What five steps do banks need to take to make this collaboration happen?
Cyberattacks have become one of the biggest threats, not only to business but to society at large. Cybercriminals, hacktivists and nation states are now capable of deploying malicious code to bring down everything from corporates to critical infrastructure in an instant.
Following on from our recent piece, “Five Industries in Which to Invest in 2019”, we now turn our attention to some of the most promising individual stocks within those industries. Looking forward to 2019, each one of the five sectors certainly appears to have some winners.
Despite the record-breaking highs achieved by US stock markets, 2018 is ending with virtually all those gains wiped out. And it’s not just the United States that has suffered. Germany’s DAX, the United Kingdom’s FTSE 100 and Japan’s Nikkei 225 are all ending the year firmly in the red.
The financial services industry relies more on information technology than any other sector. That makes perfect sense given the high-speed and detail-oriented nature of the industry. Unfortunately, it’s costing a lot more to protect and maintain financial data these days.
Anyone working in banking knows that customer expectations are charging ahead at full throttle, fuelled by technology advances. Fortunately banks can use innovations such as AI and IoT to meet customers where they are at, and a recent Fujitsu report shows they are doing—or planning to do—just that. So what can we reasonably expect banking to become as a result of this transformative process?
As FinTech companies disrupt the financial services industry with marketplace lending and blockchain-based supply chains, wholesale banks are meeting the challenge by reprioritizing IT spending and improving their innovation capacity.
ATM crime will always exist in one form or another. The European Association for Secure Transactions (EAST)found that in 2016 transaction reversal fraud was up 147% compared to 2015, highlighting how certain types of attacks are becoming more prevalent in some geographical areas.