UnionBank’s “moonshot” determination to undergo a complete digital transformation pervades the entire organization, not only the IT Department. UnionBankers are united in their vision for “making the diff” for their customers and wider communities by excelling in innovative products and services. In our interview, we discussed the bank’s progress with leaders from four separate areas of this ambitious Philippine bank.
Imagine you’re one of the nearly 40 million Tanzanians who live in a rural community. It would most likely take a day of your time and a considerable portion of your earnings just to travel to the nearest brick-and-mortar financial institution.
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?
Over the years, the prospect of a banking career has lost a lot of its luster, and this has been particularly true over the course of the past decade. Millennials, as they enter the workforce, are steering away from financial services in favor of other career opportunities. What’s behind the loss of appeal, and how can bank culture move from the defensive to offensive position?
It is becoming clear that trade digitisation has huge potential to unlock access to world trade for small-to-medium-sized enterprises (SMEs). The move away from laborious, manual, paper-based processes will lever simpler access to trade finance
Customers of financial institutions expect all of the latest digital innovations to be integrated into the products and services offered to them, but these enhancements can introduce new and more dangerous cyber threats to the sanctity of their personal data. Never before has combining effective cybersecurity, ever ready to confront today’s emerging risks, with rapidly changing technological improvements been more critical.
Traditional banks have a long history, which is good and bad—good because of well-established customer relationships; bad due to cumbersome legacy systems, some created in the days of analog, that struggle to adapt to the rapidly changing demands of the digital age. Like it or not, to keep up with customers and competitors, most banks have a lot more ground to cover.
Increasingly banks are moving from a defensive “shield” position toward automation to a more aggressive “sword” stance, using the powerful advantage they have as keepers of historical customer data to not only meet expressed client needs but predict future behavior.
The digital transformation of society as a whole has changed the expectations of customer services within the financial services sector. As a result, retail banking operations face testing times as the industry goes through significant and rapid modernisation.
When I started my working life in a city centre branch in the early 90’s, the branch staff intimately knew the life stories of virtually everyone who walked through the door.