Technology

In the decade following the global financial crisis, banks have faced a flood of new laws and regulations. The pace of change has been furious. Banks have been forced to hire more and more bodies to manage large, enterprise-wide efforts in an attempt to simply stay ahead of regulatory enforcement actions and the ensuing fines and penalties.

You could be excused for thinking that financial inclusion is a given. In reality, however, this is far from the truth. As illustrated by a recent report by the World Bank, 1.7 billion adults across the world are ‘unbanked’, meaning they do not possess a bank account or have access to formal finance. This situation is not confined to just one part of the world. Whether you live in a developed country or developing region, the unbanked can be found. For example, just 14 percent of adults in the Middle East hold a bank account.

Credit cards have become indispensable to both consumers and businesses in expediting the payment process; but when disputes arise, the system can break down into acrimony and injustice, especially when intentional fraud is committed. What programmes are card schemes Visa and Mastercard implementing to streamline the current chargeback system, settle disputes quickly and efficiently, and to protect the innocent? The new Open World model provides some answers.

The platform economy, today’s economic and/or social online matchmaker, is set to transform another industry – financial services. To keep up, banks will need to adapt their business models to an outside-in approach that recognizes the importance of openness and collaboration in developing personalized products and services that enhance the banking experience for customers and enable them to manage their finances holistically.

Digitalization has become second nature to many banks around the world, but not all. In the Central European country of Hungary, many banks—and their customers, who are relatively uninformed of the ways going digital can enhance their personal financial management—are in the early stages of the digital banking voyage. The time has arrived for Hungarian banks to jump into the present, or remain behind in the past.

Credit cards have become an essential staple of the financial world within the past century, so a world without them seems inconceivable today. But the marriage of Open Banking with Instant Payments is making that reality look more plausible, and in the not-too-distant future. How can banks not simply survive but excel in the new post-card world, in which the payments process moves in-house, providing a wealth of data?

Lately, there seems to be a frenzy well fed by consulting firms in the enterprise world about digitisation and the necessity to “digitise” companies’ business models and operations.

As the landscape of financial services continues to change, it’s critical to stay ahead of the game. ATMs were groundbreaking achievements once upon a time, while more recently, mobile baking was the logical next step in banking’s maturation.

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.

Blockchain—a cryptographic, decentralized distributed ledger system—is gaining acceptance and prestige as its multiple advantages, such as immutability, become clear, even to normally cautious financial organisations. But it isn’t all smooth sailing. Especially in Europe, some of the new data and privacy regulations clash head-on with blockchain and its attendant crypto-currencies. Can the technology overcome these hurdles and continue on its path toward broad, industry-wide adoption?