Technology

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?

How can banks and financial institutions get through to the generation born in the 1980s and 1990s, the so-called “millennials”, also known as Generation Y, given their shorter attention spans and distrust of brand loyalty?

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?

There’s good and bad news for UK banks in the 2018 FIS PACE study on SMB banking, which surveyed hundreds of small-to-midsized businesses (SMBs) throughout the country. The good: 7 out of 10 SMB clients are satisfied by their banks’ performance.

Machines are capable of “thinking” faster than their human creators, but that doesn’t necessarily mean they think better. Computers have their place in helping humans, but that doesn’t mean it is wise to let them take their place. Machines make mistakes, too, although theirs are a little different than the ones humans make. Is there a middle ground at which computers and humans can work together effectively?