Seamless Conference: Bridging digital platforms; let’s get digital with a blueprint for the banking model of the future.

Initial thoughts:

I was fortunate enough to attend the Seamless Middle East conference today 24th May at the World Trade Centre in Dubai, where a 10:30 keynote speech by several industry leaders started the event.

There were many Fintech organisations attended including Banks, eCommerce leaders, start ups and others. There were thousands of visitors over the two day event. It was a great place to network and also get chance to hear what is next within Digital Transformation from industry Leaders.

There were so many great takeaways from this event and I urge anyone to attend next time this is hosted here, and keep track of Seamless and their next event location!

These are my notes from the Key note:

#SeamlessDXB

Featuring: Fintech Galaxy, Société Generale, Mashreq Bank, Emirates NBD, Starling Bank

Keynote Panel:

Introduction:

Question 1 - Discuss the need for secure customer relationships and loyalty.

·???????Engine – Joined 7 years ago tiny start up now 3.5 million customers 9% market share in SME banking. 3000 people in the org.

·???????Starling is UK licensed and only intends to be this way. Tech company that has a bank.

·???????Engine tech side of the business.

·???????Spent lots of time raising money, conversations with VCs – Customer numbers and engagement all about this, growth and spending.

·???????Starling’s focus was customer first and getting to profitability.

·???????Becoming the primary bank for customers was the main aim.

·???????Success – customer satisfaction, if the bank is working great.

·???????The UK government measures customer satisfaction twice a year. Run independent surveys, all mandated no more than 3 clicks away from mobile app with customer satisfaction rating.

·???????Deposits, lending and metrics that make customers sticky. BCG survey 400 plus digital banks, only 20 making money and Starling turning over 600m a year making 200m in profit.

·???????Building on success with Engine. They have a reference to what a good digital bank looks like. Engine taking knowledge and helping banks/brands to do the same by providing them a working banking platform.

·???????They want to take Engine model and have bunch of successful banks in other different countries.

Question 2

Who are the customers of the future? What do you think financial institutions should consider when building a bank of future for customers whose demands are different from the last decade?

·???????Blueprints can be white papers, but they are not real life.

·???????Start with the customer. Revolves around them. Who is the customer today? Digital native customer.

·???????People already have good digital exposure to services outside of banking and FS. These experiences set the benchmark in your mind about what the customer wants.

·???????In the UAE, Government services did so well digitizing when covid hit, they set an industry benchmark that others should follow. Customers want this level of functionality across each sector and product they use.

·???????Customer wants real time services and info.

·???????Last few years of innovation driven by tech.

·???????Banking as a Service, Platform Banking, API services, Blockchain, Automation. All these financial players offer Financial Services.

·???????Mass banking – Expectations must be as simple as everything in day-to-day life. Watching a movie is simple, finances should be like that.

·???????Investments on entire new stack. Whatever you’re investing in needs to be ready in the banking world and ecosystems.

·???????Your tech esg business and customer experience strategy has to be intertwined.

·???????Employees should come along with you in the same spirit. Legacy employees and culture exposed to amount of change. Be taken and consumed and be ready for the future of digital banking.

·???????Banks need to be closer to customers than ever before.

·???????Very easy to say x technology y platform. Capabilities come and go. Need to be close to customers to meet their needs as things change.

Customer centricity, bring banking to customer.

·???????Banking will always exist, Banks may or may not exist.

·???????Banks riding wave of embedding finance and banking as a service.

·???????About using tech to embed banking in the journey of the customer to make it easier for them.

Question 3

How have you seen AI and ML implemented? What are the use cases??What does the future look like?

·???????Microsoft declared copilot initiative, more integrated to day-to-day business Ops.

·???????1st ramifications – As and when see ML portion, reduction of false positives. Accuracy of models improves. Microsoft has a high level of confidence. Will create more feedback, so can deploy more technology. Will help ease deploying resources previously constrained by mundane tasks. Help prioritise.

·???????ML at a high level, pushing deep learning portion of neural networks.

·???????Within risk, fraud detection, detect anomalies in real time with ML helps detect them. This results in customer satisfaction. This comes with operating in a safer environment. Fraud was mitigated in a secure way.

·???????2nd – Context based chat bots, more interactive services. Bring more value from interaction. Goes on to point of embedded tech to existing tech stack becoming more seamless. Invisible machine behind infra giving customer satisfaction.

·???????3rd – when customers interact huge possibility of money laundering problems. Customers customer, shift from consumer to intermediaries for payments activities. AI with use of graph databases makes this more transparent with AI deployment.

·???????Lots of possibilities with AI and ML. Improve overall ecosystem, connecting the dots, more depth to analytics.

Question 4

Wholesale banking landscape being redefined, digital primary driver. What is Mashreq doing in this area with examples?

·???????Over the years people focus on customers sme, focus on wholesale increasing drastically.

·???????Mashreq has an independent studio created focusing only on wholesale banking.

·???????Utilising most of technologies like Data Analytics, Chat GPT etc. Unique and something want to work on.

·???????Mentioned comment, banks will exist, but not in the same shape and form, evolve with time.

·???????Collaborations – Working closely with fintech’s, joined ANC launchpad as founding member. Setting up a studio to create data products. Some of key areas, day to day utilizing use cased for predictive credit analysis revenue predictions. Created models used locally and further.

Question 5

When you think about digital banking and tech, how do balance delivery with security and customer loyalty?

·???????When establishing new bank is difficult. Must sit at heart to build trust.

·???????Deliberately looks and feels like a bank.

·???????Trust is earned and retained through performance over time. Tech part of it, always on available etc. Never have maintenance windows don’t take bank offline. Built engine that makes this possible. Focus on resilience in architectural systems. Other banks can do this been around longer.

·???????Built systems so each individual part would fail, and the system is still on.

·???????Starling only UK bank had no outage in past 5 years. Testament to this.

·???????From the customer side, build trust from journey, taking them through, right level of control?

·???????Quick onboarding process when launched. Was too fast for people, but there is a little bit of friction now because no one believes this can happen in real time. Counter to all product design window, ask more questions than necessary then do more checks than necessary. These changes increased the amount of money customers were depositing.

·???????This excites banks when they are working with Engine.

·???????What really earns trust is getting hold of the bank when you really need them. Most people still have banks with a branch for this.

·???????Customer facing part of experience, don’t make use of chatbots etc. You get straight through to a human in under a minute. Can afford to do this because it’s a properly digital native bank. Digital first not 30-year-old bank with digital front end. Digital journeys for things that others haven’t got so far with like payments, card disputes etc.

Question 6

Thinking of a blueprint of future bank how do we bridge the gap of a digital transformation journey across the market?

·???????Depends, for an institution invested 5 years ago, has right insights on what customer was looking for.

·???????For those getting started, fundamentals stay the same. Proliferation of a lot of excellent digital competitors to traditional legacy organisations. The writing is on the wall. If you don’t keep pace with what your customer wants.

·???????Transformation, holistic. Trying to become what your customers want to be for them.

·???????Business case and ability to sell that, that’s where you want to be.

·???????So many different opportunities for a customer. Specific areas, want it to be east, other areas, need one to one, expert advice etc. For an org to recognize that today, simple.

Questions to the floor:

How are we tackling the issue at large scale with legacy systems and culture?

·???????Change is about people, investment in to learning and dev, enabling and empowering your teams, giving them empowerment, entrepreneurial ability to drive and accept change with you is very important.

·???????If change isn’t accepted, many different transformations stress more about ensuring how you take your team along before your customers. In a nutshell, exceptionally strong lever in organizational change.

How you can maintain your existing customers, when technology companies provide ROI also?

·???????Banks are investing heavily in people, future stacks collaboration. Banks are creating an ecosystem. Not just competing. Allow banks to be nimbler, a lot of these will converge. A lot of these technology companies provide a threat, banks will change models to co-exist with them.

What is the key for digital transformation with banking industry vs non fs?

·???????Must differentiate, Financial Sector it’s difficult to do Digital transformation better than other sectors, due to the industry being so heavily regulated. Dealing with money involves more significant risk. This does add an extra layer of complexity. The reason is operating guidelines, regulations big difference. 2nd is adopting and embracing technology is quicker for google, than a bank. Technical debt in banks, not on par with non-banking organization. The pace at which can adopt technology is different. It’s a challenge they must face and overcome.