Richard Dratva: «Five Banking Trends That Will Interlock in 2019»

Richard Dratva: «Five Banking Trends That Will Interlock in 2019»

Financial institutions simplify the customer journey through intelligent and proactive data usage. They find the right words that the individual customers will definitely understand, making it easier for them to understand financial products. AI makes it possible to do without additional personal advice, reserving the personal advice for complex situations.

4. Digital Is The New Revenue

Investment in digitisation must pay off. Banks are challenged not only to reduce costs through digitisation, but also to generate additional digital revenue from their ecosystems and redesigned customer journeys.

The usage of APIs by and for third parties opens up new potential for the so-called «platform economy», which to date has hardly been tapped by banks. It is important for a bank to follow a new philosophy by cooperating actively with Fintech partners.

This is the only way banks can benefit from the new opportunities, they need to understand the principle behind «banking as a platform» and not building a defensive wall against the digital world, often the case in the past.

5. Time to Market Is The New All-You-Can-Eat

The financial industry cannot afford huge «Big Bang» digital projects with long runtimes anymore, not only because of financial or risk reasons, but especially as customers don't want to wait a long time for new offerings. Customers want to be positively surprised with regular improvements that get more enticing and attractive.

Agile process models make it possible to bring these visible improvements as viable products to the market within weeks. They can be tested in the market and big investments are not necessary. If something is not successful, it can be replaced with new ideas easily.

This agile approach, which of course is also associated with uncertainty, contradicts the conventional way of planning new product launches to the last detail. On the way to the digital future, the direction is given but the result sometimes only takes on its final form during the process.

Financial service providers should start with small strides in their digital transformation journey: Tireless and without hesitation – one step at a time. In time to come, management will be amazed by how far they have progressed.

From 1987 to 1991, Richard Dratva was employed as an internal consultant with the Swiss Bank Corporation (today UBS). From 1992 to 1994, he was engaged as a research associate at the Institute of Information Management at the University of St.Gallen. From 1995 to 1996, he acted as a consultant with Teleinform before becoming a founding member of Crealogix in 1996.