Profile

Location

London

Member since

2017

Writes about

Regulation & Compliance Retail banking

Richard's blog archive

2023 (2) 2021 (2)

Richard's long read archive

2023 (1)

Richard Kalas

Client Solutions Director for Retail Banking at GFT Group

Message Posts: 4 Comments: 4

Blogs

Majority of consumers feel anxious checking banking apps as cost-of-living challenges bite

16 Jan 2023

It’s safe to say the economic challenges facing banking customers have only been exacerbated in recent weeks and months. The UK has officially entered recession, the cold winter months have meant the cost of energy is squeezing household finances more than ever and wider cost-of-living challenges continue to impact consumer spending. As a result o...

Banks high in customer satisfaction but low in trust - can they improve and why do they need to?

03 Jan 2023

The spread of digitalised services for banking has grown omnipresent. Banks expanded their services into online support and digital banking services as the rise of fintech and challenger banks sparked innovation sector-wide. These services have increased customer satisfaction concerning traditional institutions, however, consumer trust remains low...

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Long reads

How reactive banks can build resilience for customer and organisation

23 Feb 2023

Economic volatility has ushered in a new wave of financial concern for the UK. Customers of banks who lack in-depth financial knowledge are now relying on banking providers to help inform them to make wiser financial decisions as inflation continues to surge. Guiding customers through the cost-of-living crisis is vital for the well-being of custom...

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Richard is Commenting on

Fintech founders accuse Starling's Boden of trying to stifle innovation

Open Banking, as a UK regulatory mandate, may perhaps fall short of initial expectation. It is unjust to label it a failure. It was known in advance that additional friction would make it less attractive than incumbent methods for payments. And, whilst SCA sought to level the field, its implementation was necessarily extended due to other tech priorities on banks as a result of the Covid pandemic. Interestingly, an increase in payment use through open banking, prior to full rollout of SCA, indicates consumers are accepting of it despite current flaws. Open banking as a concept for the industry has evolved into open finance and this continues to garner the interest of a wider section of the financial services industry. This will undoubtedly foster further innovation and competition in the banking sector and in turn it will exceed the original intentions of Open Banking.

10 Jan 2022 Reply Read article

Glen outlines pathway to live Britcoin launch

It doesn't take years to document, prove and implement this technology. It is already in full use. It needs decision, courage, leadership and the correct technology partner; one that has a track record in this field.

11 Nov 2021 Reply Read article

Conversational Banking Is a Competitive Necessity in a Remote-Everything World

Voice is only part of the story here. The real value comes from the technology platforms required to support speech recognition and Natural Language Processing. The "speech to text" and NLP create a simple mechanism for capture, audit, analysis and machine learning at a scale and pace not previously seen. Businesses are able to harvest knowledge from all their customer service interactions to create autonomous AI offerings with access to a vast knowledge base of information.

28 Jul 2021 Reply Read article

IBM and Visa join forces to turn billions of connected devices into points of sale

This is an extremely interesting venture for IBM and VIsa, and yet another alert to financial services institutions to understand their digital readiness. The banks must understand that IoT should be considered as small interactions, often and at scale. It is more important they prepare their infrastructure for this. For example, we have seen that around 30-40% of consumption of their mainframe processing can be simple balance queries. Whilst a smart fridge or intelligent shoes won't disintermediate a bank from their customers, the increase in touchpoints with their systems will impact their costs significantly yet preventing a customer from connecting will encourage them elsewhere. The strategy of Open API and Mainframe Offloading is aligning to these. Enabling customers to connect anything with their finances yet allowing banks to efficiently manage the infrastructure and associated costs.

17 Feb 2017 Reply Read article