CIO Review APAC

How Technological Advancements Are Disrupting The Banking Sector

CIO Review APAC | Tuesday, September 27, 2022

As banks identify potential technological skills that transform banking sectors to meet customer demand, banking technologies are becoming more prevalent in their business models.

FREMONT, CA: As the world has arrived at a digital age, there is an increase in competition in every industry. In the banking industry, this competition is driven by technology-based FinTech startups. This trend is compelling banks to update their systems, which have evolved to meet immediate customer requirements and led to siloed systems used for transactions, investments, savings, and loan accounts.

Today, banks and other traditional financial service providers need to respond with a set of digitisation and innovation initiatives. This inventiveness can leverage advanced technologies to ensure a customer-centric view rather than the conventional emphasis on products and real-time intelligent data integration. With these advantageous phenomena, there are several technologies disrupting banking and financial services.

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Augmented Reality

Immersive technologies like augmented, virtual, and mixed reality are enhancing customer experiences across every domain in the banking sector. There is no clear picture of the possibilities of implementing augmented reality technology in the banking sector as they are still in an early developmental stage. The goal is to give customers complete autonomy in actions and transactions they could perform at home. Technology experts who think that bank branches as we know them today are extinct have hybrid branches in their mind.

Implementing AR in banking has already become a reality in a few financial institutions. These organisations have developed a rich data augmented reality application for customers who are seeking to buy and sell a home. It delivers information like current listings, recent sales, and price tendencies to help users make optimal decisions.

Blockchain Technology

Blockchain allows multiple parties to access the same data simultaneously and ensures the integrity and immutability of the details entered into the database. Currently, prominent banks worldwide are exploring proof-of-concept projects around various aspects of banking and financial services. Clearing and settlement arenas will witness the major implementation of blockchain technology. This will help investment banks to save huge amounts and improve the efficiency of clearing and settlement systems.

Another significant sector where banks will witness great savings by deploying blockchain technology is KYC (know your customer) operations. Developing business models will translate KYC from a cost centre into a profit centre for banks as they will depend on a shared blockchain for this activity. Along with these areas, syndicated loans, trade finance, and payments are other fields where smart contracts on the blockchain will be extremely useful.

Robotic Process Automation

With the rise of the digital economy, there is a massive increase in the volume of unstructured data banks have to process. They are not limited to banking transaction data but also include other behavioural data that will potentially enable banks to enhance and innovate the customer experience. This process paved the way for bankers to adopt technologies with human attributes and judgement with higher speed, scale, and quality. The answer lies in combining various technologies that enable cognitive and robotic process automation in banking.

These technologies include machine learning, natural language processing, chatbots, robotic process automation, and intelligent analytics in banking that assist bots in improving and learning. Many financial service professionals opine that such technologies are a strategic priority. However, the system's current state in robotic automation is still nascent in the cognitive and analytical aspects of the processes. The future of cognitive capabilities will be bombarded with robotic process automation to obtain better results. The point-of-sale solutions have already implemented this system, automatically suggesting marketing promotions that will be highly effective for individual customers.

Quantum Computing

Quantum computing is a method of using quantum mechanics to process complex data operations. While computers use bits that can have two values-1 OR 0, quantum computing uses quantum bits that offer three states-1 or 0 or both. With the use of the right algorithm, quantum computing offers greater computing power than traditional computing systems. This indicates a huge leap in computing power. However, steps still need to be taken for the commercial implementation of this approach.

Artificial Intelligence

As stated earlier, there is extensive growth of structured and unstructured data available to banks, and the increase in cloud computing and machine learning technologies has resulted in the usage of artificial intelligence across the banking and financial services landscape.

Business needs and capabilities of AI implementations have risen hand-in-hand, and banks see AI as a differentiator to defeat the burgeoning competition. AI helps banks leverage huge volumes of data insights to make optimal decisions across different functions like back-office operations, marketing, customer experience, compliance, and product delivery risk management.

Additionally, AI deployment will create sector-specific opportunities in banking and financial services. This potential can be applied across deposits, payments, lending, investment management, market infrastructure, and capital markets. AI will likely transform banks by transitioning the focus from the asset scale to the data scale. Banks will now emphasise delivering customised experiences to their customers rather than building bulky products for large markets.

Banks will now become more customer-focused and retain them by offering high retention benefits instead of retaining them through high switch costs. Moreover, banks' performance will result from the interplay between technology and talent and not be confined to reliance on human ingenuity for enhancing their services.

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