Payments continues to be one of the most disruptive and dynamic banking businesses. Innovations spanning the spectrum from incumbents to FinTech alike are reshaping the payments landscape, boosting customer expectations, and intensifying competition globally.
With friction endemic in almost every legacy payment system, the search for frictionless digital payment experiences continues. PayPal, for instance, crossed 250 million active users worldwide. In fact, contactless in-store payments globally are on a high and increasing and are continuing to gather steam in many countries, including the United States.
Also Behavioural biometrics and AI should be used alongside physical biometrics to step up dynamic authentication. Royal Bank of Scotland began collecting behavioral biometrics data for its wealthy clients and has now expanded the scope to include all retail and commercial customers.
Banks are expected to make significant investment in data management, analytics, and AI to improve both the customer and adviser experience. Also, real-time forms, identity verification, and video chat/recording compatibility that improve onboarding should become a standard in wealth management.
REACH, a fintech that enables organisations to close transactions remotely by verifying clients’ identities and getting their signatures on documents in real time, while video recording the whole session, is an example of this.
No doubt many banks have embraced digital transformation across the banking and capital markets value chain. Banks are expected to become more active in the fintech space, either by launching stand-alone digital banks or through partnerships.
Meanwhile the importance of trust and security, irrespective of the segment, is expected to continue, especially as automation, cloud, and open banking take hold. The banking industry remains a big revenue source for many technology companies.
In response, banks are deploying a mix of strategies to stay ahead in the game, including higher technology spending on improvement of branches, ATMs, call centres, and digital banking. JPMorgan Chase (JPMC) has adopted “mobile first, digital everything, while Santander has four investments in the online lending space alone.
