Has digitization put the bank branch and cash on the extinction list? Not while consumers still demand them. To prosper today and in the future, banks will need to snatch the opportunities digital transformation offers them. Digitization is not a threat but a promise for better customer service that meets consumers where they are.
The pandemic has ignited banks’ digital transformations and stressed People as our key priority. Leading from the heart, closing the digital-skills gap, translating corporate purpose into action, undertaking a transformation that is strategically anchored and risk-balanced and maximizing customer experience, will propel banks into a better shared future.
The infiltration of multiple digital technologies in banking operations continues unabated, with the goal of outpacing customers’ expectations and fintechs’ competition. From mixed reality to voicebots and robotisation, the race to digitalize financial services securely but optimally has no end in sight. How can banks compete strongly?
The Sustainable Development Goals provide a blueprint for achieving inclusivity and sustainability, and participation from the financial sector is crucial. COVID-19 has complicated efforts to accomplish the SDGs by 2030 in the Asia-Pacific region, but ESCAP, empowered by innovation, is partnering with public and private sectors to succeed.
MCB, renowned for its longevity and supremacy in Mauritian banking, follows its vision of Success Beyond Numbers and incorporates three pillars of excellent customer-service experience: people, processes and technology. This one-stop shop for financial services is central to the region’s economic prosperity, as CEO Alain Law Min explained.
Financial services have typically lagged behind other industries when it comes to embracing digital transformation. Banks have traditionally been slower to adopt new technology due to legacy systems, cultures that have been built over hundreds of years and security concerns. A huge shift in customer expectation, however, meant that banks had to adapt or risk losing customers to challenger banks such as Monzo.
Banks are currently facing a serious generational divide, and it’s an issue that requires urgent action, lest banks lose out on the customer of the future. For most adults today, the likelihood is that they opened their first bank account in a branch, accompanied by their parents. However, with the acceleration of digital banking, this assurance has dissolved.
Covid-19 has shaped and continues to reshape the financial services sector. Demonstrating a responsible response to the challenges became just as important as the business itself, in fact it became the business: “doing the right thing” became an imperative as the context aligned the success of financial institutions to those of their stakeholders, throwing into stark relief what it really means to be sustainable.
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.
Produbanco, one of Ecuador’s top banks, has positioned itself as a leader in achieving two equally important goals: digital innovation and sustainability. Focused on both today and tomorrow, this dynamic bank is committed to meeting its customers’ current needs while ensuring that the bank of the future is better than the one of today.