Competing with Fintech companies with tech at traditional banks
https://www.ibm.com/downloads/cas/JYB6MQRB

Competing with Fintech companies with tech at traditional banks

Introduction:

Fintech companies are disrupting the financial services industry, offering new and innovative products and services that are challenging traditional banks and other financial institutions. In order to compete with fintech companies, traditional financial institutions need to embrace change and adopt new technologies. They also need to focus on customer experience and offer products and services that meet the needs of today's digital-savvy consumers.

Traditional banks have a network of physical branches that require face-to-face interactions and identity verification. However, their outdated legacy systems can make it difficult to keep up with the digital age and meet the needs of their customers.

Traditional banks can differentiate themselves from the competition by providing personalized guidance and in-person interaction for large loans and specialized services. They can also offer tailored solutions for important financial decisions. However, they may not be as convenient as online-only banks.

Traditional banks are more reliable and have physical accessibility. They are also regulated, which helps protect their customers' data and investments. However, compliance with regulations can be expensive.

Here are some of the disadvantages of traditional banks:

  • Lower accessibility due to more strict Know Your Customer/Anti Money Laundering requirements
  • Inability to do business with some countries
  • Outdated online banking
  • Longer time needed to open accounts
  • Banking must take place during business hours
  • Potentially higher monthly fees
  • Clients have to deal with a some good bureaucracy

Fintech companies have made it possible for customers to make payments seamlessly, securely, and at a lower cost than traditional banks. They offer a variety of services, such as mobile wallets, contactless payments, and digital currencies.

Fintech companies can also enable banks to provide faster lending decisions while reducing costs associated with loan processing. They often have lower fees than traditional banks and are easier to sign up with. Fintech companies are also great for tech-savvy populations.

Here are some of the advantages of fintech companies:

  • Lower fees than traditional banks in many cases
  • Potential to improve the health of community banks
  • High priority on customer experience
  • Round-the-clock online financial services
  • Not controlled by rigid legal rules like traditional banks
  • Agile and flexible for changes and adaptations
  • Easier to sign up with
  • Great for tech-savvy people
  • Feels cool and appeals to GenZ

Here are some of the risks associated with Fintech operations:

  • High failure rate of Fintech startups
  • Financial exclusion for some groups due to biased AI algorithms
  • Inadequate customer support due to Robotic nature and cost containement approaches
  • Data privacy and application security challenges
  • Unexpected market occurrences or natural events
  • Less regulatory and compliance laws adhered to
  • Outright noncompliance with regulatory requirements
  • Personal and professional liability
  • Potentially higher data thefts and cyberattacks
  • Lack of physical branches

Some ways that traditional financial institutions can compete/co-operate with Fintech companies:

  • Invest in foundational technology:?Fintech companies are built on technology, so traditional financial institutions need to invest in digital transformation in order to keep up. This includes investing in new technologies such as Hybrid cloud computing, Artificial Intelligence, and Blockchain. IBM provides tools that operate on multiple clouds like Azure, AWS, GCP, Alibaba, etc. Using IBM OpenShift, banks can leverage horizontal scalability to meet the surge needs like processing thousands of game-day tickets in a given period of a few seconds.
  • Enhance customer experience:?Make it easy for customers to do their banking online and on mobile devices.
  • Offer innovative products and services: constantly innovate, offering new products and services that meet the needs of today's consumers, such as mobile payments, peer-to-peer lending, and robo-advisory services (e.g. Robinhood).
  • Partner with fintech companies: tap into the innovation of fintech companies while also providing their customers with a more seamless experience.
  • Become Customer-Centric:?Put the needs of your customers first and always strive to provide them with a great experience.
  • Data-driven decisions:?Use data to make informed decisions about your products, services, and marketing campaigns. Establish a data fabric
  • LLM AI tools: use tools like watsonx with financial Industry specific LLM models with RAG(Retrieval Augmented Generation - a language generation model that combines pre-trained parametric and non-parametric memory for language generation). Industry specific LLM models generate personalized financial advice, create marketing materials, and automate customer service tasks.

Currently in watsonx.ai, AI builders can leverage models from IBM and the Hugging Face community, which are pre-trained to support a range of Natural Language Processing (NLP) tasks including question answering, content generation and summarization, text classification and extraction. [1]

IBM Cloud for Financial Services

The IBM Cloud for Financial Services comes to the rescue of traditional banks and investment banks

"The IBM Cloud for Financial Services is a platform and ecosystem program designed to enable FIs and their ecosystem partners to confidently host applications and workloads in the public cloud. To develop the IBM Cloud for Financial Services, IBM collaborated with leaders from Bank of America and Promontory (an IBM Services Company and global leader in financial services regulatory compliance consulting). At the heart of the IBM Cloud for Financial Services is the IBM Framework that establishes a new generation of cloud for enterprises with common operational criteria and streamlined compliance controls framework specifically for the financial services industry. It’s designed to enable banks and their ISV ecosystem partners to transact with confidence. Going beyond standard compliance and regulatory standards, the IBM Framework includes an extensive control set spanning cybersecurity, data privacy, access management, and configuration management. IBM also provides detailed guidance documentation, including reference architectures and control implementation. And policy provisions are made for continuous updates relative to changing regulatory requirements." [3]?

In a case study IBM notes:

"The majority of financial services suffer from the burden of legacy technology and inflexible applications that impede productivity gains. Fearful of the complexity and regulatory requirements, the security risks of re-platforming core systems and continuous compliance, many of them persevere with outmoded, costly legacy Information Technology (IT)."?[4]

"Then, along came a succession of changes, including regulated data and payments exchanges, cross-border, customer data privacy implications, different time zones as part of geographic expansion, near-real-time payments and always-on digital channels. Rather than propagate these changes throughout their systems, FIs have tended to add new layers of technology to accommodate each new product, channel, function and geographic location." [4]

"In fact, close to 70 percent of IT budgets are relegated to simply run (“Hold” App modernization budget portfolio), leaving only <30 percent to grow and transform (“Buy”). Firms that prioritize retiring outdated technology (“Sell”) can reallocate budgets to invest in innovation."

"The framework’s?565 control requirements ?serve as the foundation for the IBM Cloud?for Financial Services, and they cover administrative, technical and physical concerns common across the financial services industry. The control requirements were initially based on NIST 800-53 and have been enhanced significantly based on collaboration with major financial institutions around the world. As the regulatory landscape changes, we continue to update the framework based on evolving industry standards and feedback from our partners. In addition, we have?partnered ?with organizations like the Cloud Security Alliance (CSA) to map the control requirements to the CSA’s Cloud Controls Matrix (CCM), a cybersecurity control framework for cloud computing that helps to address third- and fourth-party risk in the cloud." [5]

Deployment guidance and VPC landing zone deployable architectures are given in ref 6 below


Note: Opinions expressed are that of the author and not of IBM corporation. No warranties express or implied.

References:

  1. https://newsroom.ibm.com/2023-08-09-IBM-Plans-to-Make-Llama-2-Available-within-its-Watsonx-AI-and-Data-Platform
  2. https://www.ibm.com/cloud/financial-services
  3. https://www.ibm.com/downloads/cas/JYB6MQRB
  4. https://www.ibm.com/blog/rethinking-the-core-banking-app-modernization-journey-with-ibm-cloud-for-financial-services/
  5. https://www.ibm.com/blog/making-ibm-cloud-for-financial-services-work-for-you/
  6. https://cloud.ibm.com/docs/secure-infrastructure-vpc?topic=secure-infrastructure-vpc-overview


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