Why changing is so difficult? | FinTech Summary 84

It’s very difficult for banks to change. There are many external factors to overcome — regulation, customer expectations, competition, internal complexity. However, the biggest factor is the mindset. Lack of leadership belief is the biggest break in the process. The reason it’s difficult to learn something new is that it will change you into someone who disagrees with the person you used to be. Changing direction requires admitting that you were going in off course in the first place.

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The power of banking with purpose
By Jim Marous

The importance of a well-defined, articulated and acted upon purpose has never been more important for a financial services organization. Unfortunately, most financial institutions lack an underlying purpose or lack the commitment from top management that motivates both employees and customers. Some organisations do little more than express their purpose as if it was an ad slogan that is changed with the seasons. Some purpose statements lack differentiation and could easily be used by other financial organisations or firms in other industries. Some purpose statements are more similar to a ‘wish list’, with no real connection to where a firm is or where it can effectively go in the future. Finally, there are those banks or credit unions that create an effective purpose statement, only to do nothing to support the purpose on a daily basis to employees or customers.

Open APIs — leveraging banking as a service to compete and collaborate
By David Donovan

In an API world where data is currency and a customer-centric experience is king, banks are lagging behind the tech titans. However, the advent of open banking legislation may just force the hand of banks to innovate around the customer before tech firms enter the financial services market. Banks should look at APIs as a way to enhance service offerings, improve customer engagement, increase digital revenues and build partnership models with fintech while ensuring regulatory and data guardrails are in place. There is an unprecedented opportunity for banks to make every customer interaction more seamless and strengthen their partnership ecosystems by building a core API strategy.

Customer experience as a competitive advantage in banking
By Artashes Vardanyan

The evolution of the customer service in traditional banking was very slow during the past few decades. One of the milestones in that matter was probably the invention of the ATM in 1967 for the automation of bank-teller operations. Then the customer support in branches started to migrate to telephone banking, followed by the smartphone era that changed the approach of banks in dealing with customers. Mobile technologies have significantly affected the financial services industry, forcing institutional players to tailor their businesses to survive in the mobile-first environment. Innovation in customer service is becoming a huge priority for banks; the world today is changing rapidly and everything we know is getting digitised.

A holistic approach to cybersecurity
By Joe McKendrick

Today’s waves of cyberattacks may be coming on too fast for the best computer scientists to unravel fast enough to stop their spread across connected networks. If anything, the recent ransomware attacks that shook up many of the world’s IT systems highlights the need for insurers to work even harder — and smarter — to batten down their hatches. More money is part of the solution, and there doesn’t seem to be a shortage of that going into security efforts. But throwing more money at the problem will only be feeding a black hole which will keep demanding more dollars, euros, pounds or rupees. Insurers need to get smarter about their cybersecurity as well. Looking at their own protective requirements, connected insurers face increasing threats that need to be addressed aggressively.

Originally published at FinTech Summary.