A Finextra member 05 October, 2020, 13:29 0 likes

Great insights, thanks for sharing this with us. As Anders la Cour mentions, COVID-19 is accelerating the move towards digitization and partnerships between solution providers. What I see is that traditional banks, which have a range of services and a large and fairly loyal customer base, are seeking to work together with FinTechs, who go narrow and deep, and put digital customer experience front and center. What retail banks are doing, is setting up ecosystems of services to deliver a complete solution in the defining moments of people’s lives: when they are buying a house, getting married,… By offering services that are adjacent to the core business of the bank, they can act as a one-stop-shop.

This has indeed been going on for some time already, even before the push for digitization. What’s new, is that banks are now using their mobile apps as a marketing tool. By integrating third-party solutions that have nothing to do with banking, they are pulling in new customers by offering them easy purchase of concert tickets, public transport vouchers or even video highlights of sports events. That’s what open banking has made possible these last few years.

Anders is quite right in saying that banks have a technology legacy. However, this need not  stand in the way of integration with third-party solution providers. These can be bundled through the use of APIs, hiding the back-office complexity for the consumer.

Evolutions like digitization or the arrival of new players in the market, such as FinTech companies, don’t mean traditional banks will disappear. Rather, it’s a wake-up call that is driving banks to focus more on the customer, and less on internal systems and their own product portfolio.