Today, paradigm shifts in technological advancements have reshaped the global digital era. Technology is constantly driving change in almost every industry in this digital era. Technology has become an indispensable requirement for society and systems, from work automation to service digitization, from virtual collaboration to smart home, and from cloud computing to data analysis—business ecology, especially digital transformation in banking.

The finance industry is on the frontline that is rigorously exploring and innovating with the digitization power of technology. It is also one of the leading industries to adopt digitization successfully. The worldwide mass adoption of digital banking over conventional banking practices is one of the most commendable digital transformations of the Finance industry.

What is digital transformation in banking?

Today, the paradigm shift in technological advancements has reshaped the global era of digitization. Technology is continuously driving change in almost every industry in this digital era. From job automation to service digitization, virtual collaboration to intelligent homes, and cloud computing to data analytics, technology has become an essential, indispensable requirement for society and the business ecosystem.

The finance industry is on the frontline that is rigorously exploring and innovating with the digitization power of technology. It is also one of the leading industries to adopt digitization successfully. The worldwide mass adoption of digital banking over conventional banking practices is one of the most commendable digital transformations of the Finance industry.

Digital transformation in banking is essential to improvising how banks and other financial institutions learn about, interact with, and satisfy customers’ needs. To be more precise, an efficient digital transformation begins with understanding digital customer behavior, preferences, choices, likes, dislikes, and stated and unstated requirements.

The following article by Omatech shows how different technologies are bringing improvements in the streamlining of the banking industry. Emerging technologies such as AI, Blockchain, Cloud Computing, IoT, RPA, and AR/VR are rapidly being harnessed to enrich the existing financial landscape and extend their reach to other areas.

• Analysis and risk management for banking operations
  A fraud detection system and multi-level validation of transactions eliminate possible mistakes of the customers and banking staff.
• Speedy operation lowers transaction times.
  Big Data processing systems with microservice-based architecture allow quick and safe transaction processing.
• Data handling with enhanced security
  Data encryption techniques save banks from fraudulent cases of external and internal information leakage to hackers. Moreover, the transactions are securely executed.
• Predictive capabilities
  Understanding problems that are probable to occur in the future is key to your financial success. The trusted information on different scenarios of a global economic crisis will help you prepare in advance. Hence, you can make the right business decisions and integrate winning Fintech solutions before switching your enterprises to another more promising and financially rewarding industry.

Which factors drive the digital transformation in banking?

Increasing use of smart devices, improved connectivity, and demand for high-end-user experience are among the crucial aspects that drive the digital transformation trend, taking services to the customer’s doorstep.

The banking industry is moving through such drastic modernization to enrich the scope for digital transformation across many functions. The following are the key factors contributing to digital change in the banking industry.

1. Leverage the Power of Data

Banking institutions can benefit from data and related tools and resources to foster growth. The different practices associated with data analytics can help us know and learn about customer thinking patterns. Analyzing the patterns helps them develop the desired product that matches customer needs. It could also gain insights to offer enhanced products and experience and strengthen customer relationship.

2. Modernize infrastructure

Apart from integrating innovative digital technologies, digital transformation is also impacted due to infrastructure. The infrastructure is crucial in streamlining the information flow required for digital front-end operations. The modernized infrastructure serves to support digital platforms. For example, APIs, DevOps, and microservice architecture can help upgrade the core systems for continuous integration and delivery, resulting in faster release cycles.

3. Continuous Improvement

With the doubling of consumer expectations, the banks need smooth functioning stages to track market trends, test innovative products, and use fast feedback mechanisms. These stages are consistent improvements in the banking sphere. These agile innovation pipeline stages contribute to on-demand service delivery and continuous improvement, speeding up time-to-market and customer engagement.

4. Upskill the workforce

The World Economic Forum’s report states that over 55% of finance sector employees will need to upgrade their skill set to satisfy functionalities’ current and changing demands. The driving force for improved skill sets will require necessary investment for change in operational and learning strategy, thinking patterns, skillet training, and more across the teams.

5. Improving the customer journey

Nowadays, customers look for seamless digital experiences across every channel service and product. Creating a digital customer journey means starting the steps to integrate and merge everything into a single online platform. This would help to handle the customer through similar tools and similar people with the same information throughout the process. For example, a digitized customer journey allows customers to click on an ad, sign up for an account online, receive tutorials and onboarding information through their app, receive automated loan decisions, and pay bills or send funds online.

Digital transformation has developed the need for financial institutions to adopt a ‘customer-first approach to succeed in this competitive scenario. Seamless service delivery, high-end-user experience, personalized product services, transparency, and high security, stand at the forefront of customer satisfaction in today’s fast-changing market trend.

Which technologies can contribute to digital transformation in the banking industry?

Digital transformation in the banking sector needs a radical shift to online digital services and a change in backend processes to facilitate digitization and automation. To withstand the competency of digital natives, banks should provide an end-to-end digital experience to their customers by integrating necessary technologies. These technologies have made instantaneous financial transactions globally, making the financial sector more efficient.

Here’s a quick rundown of technologies that have contributed to the digital transformation in the banking industry.

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1. Artificial Intelligence (AI)

AI is reinventing the entire ecosystem of the banking sector as it stands at the forefront in its adoption. Banks can explore immense benefits with AI with low cost and more revenue through multiple channels. The Business Insider Intelligence report states that the average estimation of cost savings for banks with AI technology is expected to reach 447 dollars by 2023.

From improvements in speed, cost, accuracy, and efficiency, AI-powered tools can use extensive data histories and support decision-making, enhance the customer experience and improve overall banking operations. The benefits of AI in banks and credit unions are widespread, reaching back-office operations, compliance, customer experience, product delivery, risk management, and marketing, and more. AI alone has the potential to streamline all the processes of banking operations. When integrated with other technologies like big data analytics, RPA, voice interface can lead to effective lending decisions and better risk management.

Following are some strategic areas where banking industries identify how AI can help them drive beneficial results. The use-cases of AI are organized into three main categories that highlight potential opportunities in the banking industry.

Banks leverage AI on the front end to smooth customer identification and authentication, connect live employees through chatbots and voice assistants, deepen customer relationships, and provide personalized insights and recommendations. Here are some of the use cases of AI technology that have transformed banking operations.

• Robo Advisors
  Robo Advisors are automated platforms designed to provide financial and investment management advice. They make use of algorithms to collect information. These tools are developed using AI with cognitive systems, machine learning, and natural language processing. Hence, Robo advisors can provide suggestions related to investment catered to clients’ expectations. Customers looking for digital interaction or with a ‘do-it-yourself’ approach can benefit from contextualized products and experiences, financial advice, and cost reduction.
• Credit Scoring
  Banks rely on collecting transactional data, statistical analysis, and involved risks while checking clients’ creditworthiness. AI technology enables precise scoring with improved credit access and helps banks provide suitable customer debt plans. AI ensures that banks manage credit risk to maintain financial stability.
• Fraud detection
  Fraud detection has been the hotspot for the application of AI in banking.AI helps in the prevention of suspicious activities associated with financial crimes. A Fraud Detection System (FDS) handles the threats like attacks on banks or clients related to money transfers, identity fraud, and fraudulent cases among employees. The FDS undergoes several data collection stages, supervised adaptive learning, and analysis of transactional data to detect fraudulent activities. Besides saving money to financial institutions, AI-based solutions can be effectively used in AML and other financial crimes.
• Virtual assistants and Chatbots
  These applications of AI have revolutionized customer services and business communication. A virtual assistant can anticipate and answer thousands of customer questions and help customers perform banking transactions in real time. Customers cannot wait for long hours to get their queries resolved. They demand quick responses and practical solutions to meet their needs. In banking organizations, chatbots effectively offer financial guidelines, assist customers in registration, and reduce the time and human resources for two-way communication like email, phone, etc. They made thoughtful conversations with millions of customers to connect with banks.
• Productivity gains
  Almost the top 20% of back-office work accounts for 85% of the cost. Labor-intensive work like compliance reporting, new customer onboarding communications, and documentation can become highly accurate and efficient by adopting AI tools and technologies.

2. Blockchain

A distributed ledger technology acts as a decentralized database and helps customers protect their financial data from real-time payments. As the name suggests, a blockchain is an immutable chain that stores the information of the blocks. The firm and decentralized nature of blockchain do not allow data tampering, ensuring integrity and high security. It resolves issues like fraud detection and cyber attack prevention. Blockchain helps remove third parties in the loans and credit system, making it safe to borrow money and reducing interest rates. It also promotes transparency during payments & currency exchange in banking.

Blockchain technology allows easy streamlining of banking operations and automating processes with the help of smart contracts. Banks deploy blockchain technology to perform inter-bank transfers, cross-border payments, KYC processes, lending, fraud reduction, and more. Leveraging blockchain technology can enable banks to quickly enhance their payments, remittances, and traceability goals.

The benefits of Blockchain technology in the banking sector include:

• Time sensitivity
  Blockchain enables the real-time settlement of recorded transactions, reduces risk, and provides an enhanced customer experience.
• Manual processing
  Blockchain maintains an automated audit trail of transactions, reducing manual processing for data validations and reconciliations.
• Transparency and Immutability
  The hash/pointers of the records written on the blockchain are immutable and irreversible. As a result, it is impossible to modify any data, eliminating the risk of fraudulent cases.
• Authentication
  Smart contracts allow business validations and automated records for transaction processing.
• Intermediary
  Blockchain is a distributed ledger technology, thereby removing the middlemen and reducing costs and lowering latency.
• Data Distribution
  Blockchain’s distributed ledger and consensus mechanism allow data consistency across multiple participants.

Besides multiple benefits, blockchain offers ample opportunities to utilize in the banking industry. Some of the prominent use-cases of blockchain in banking are as stated below.

• Payments and Clearance
  Cross-border payments are faster and cheaper with banking in the blockchain. The remittance costs within the blockchain are 2-3% of the total amount compared with 5-20% withheld by other third parties. It removes the need for intermediaries or third-party authorization, thereby speeding up the cross-border payment process. Accenture estimates that investment banks would save 10 billion dollars with blockchain deployment in improving the efficiency of clearing and settlement systems.
• KYC
  The blockchain acts as an anchor for automating KYC processes. Blockchain is a secure distributed ledger that can store and share KYC-oriented data. Banks invest a lot of time verifying where customer money came from, their financial history, business interests, and so on. The industry has to automatically update a database for KYC-based customer data. When looking for a legally permissible solution to share such data between banks and loan officers, it is better to opt for a blockchain solution.
• Trade Finance
  Financial institutions act as the guarantor of payment between seller and buyer. While issuing a letter of credit to the seller requires intermediaries — banks, financiers, insurers, and export credit agencies. All of them tend to cost more. Implementing blockchain-based solutions for trade could reduce record-keeping costs, eliminate intermediaries with savage of time and money.
• Syndicated Lending
  Syndicated lending implies providing loans to individuals by a group of lenders. These lenders are usually banks. The involvement of numerous participants hampers the processing time in the case of conventional banking methods. Therefore, blockchain-based solutions speed up the process, thereby ensuring transparency. The decentralized ledger technology helps the banks distribute the tasks related to local compliance or KYC and attach them to a single customer block.

3. Cloud Computing

Implementing cloud computing in banking enhances the performance of financial institutions and scale-up services more quickly. The pay-as-you-go facility makes it easy for individual customers or businesses to pay only for cloud usage. In the banking industry, cloud computing helps to promote safe online payments, digital money transfers, wallets, etc. Banks can decrease data storage costs by leveraging cloud-based services by saving on capital expenditure (CAPEX) and operating expenditure (OPEX) while ensuring customer data protection.

One of the beneficiaries of cloud solutions in the banking sector is LiveBank. This virtual branch banking platform is partnered with Microsoft to impart access to global banks to a catalog of cloud solutions for their customers. The Reserve Bank of India adopted a suite of cloud-based solutions for driving communication and improving collaboration among its personnel, and providing better services to its customers.

Cloud-based services in the banking environment offer the following benefits.

• On-demand scalability: Cloud-based services are agile and can provide additional technology resources whenever required as per banking institutions’ requirements. Hence, it would benefit banks that own their data centers in terms of cost.
• Security and availability: Cloud vendors offer the banking sector restraints on data manipulation in a cloud ecosystem. These security and audit restrictions facilitate audits and minimize penetrative attacks, which would otherwise require significant investments to execute in an on-premise environment.

4. Internet of Things (IoT)

Internet of Things technology connects devices/sensors in a network to provide futuristic data-driven insights. IoT has gained importance in banking services, especially retail banks, with significant investments in internal infrastructure and consumer-facing capabilities. IoT covers numerous banking solutions with some of the existing use cases mentioned below.

• Smart Collaterals
  IoT technology can enable banks to control a customer’s mortgaged assets, such as cars, and machinery, and help monitor them. The bank can issue the loan immediately and monitor the collateral status in real-time without taking physical asset custody. The bank can remotely disable or enable the machine/motor based on defined business rules. For instance, if loan EMIs are not paid, the engine could be disabled. The quality of the collateral can also be monitored in real-time.
• Wearable Payments
  Wearables such as smart watches, rings, and apparel are poised to enhance the retail banking experience. Smartwatches add to the style statement and make it easy to transfer money and payments from your bank. This whole new online banking experience through smartwatches has made it easier for a customer to interact with the bank directly from the wrist of the hand. Some banks have experimented with providing branded wearables to customers as a primary payment device. Smart glasses are the newest wearables some financial institutions adopt to process customer information for employees. Paired with wearables, the impact of the IoT on the banking industry is growing tremendously. IoT technology can transform how banking organizations allow users to pay bills, speed up transactions, and increase their quality and security. Here are a few potential ways to use wearable technology in banking:

• When the client arrives at the bank, the IoT system sends his wearable device announcements and notifications related to finance. Banks can foster a meaningful connection with customers and improve brand visibility.
• Wearables can replace Google or Apple-based transaction apps to execute transactions efficiently.
• Contactless wallets enable bank clients instantly for checking their account balance or loan status.

• Wealth Management and Automated Transactions
  The data processing algorithms help to get wealth management insights. IoT technology plays a crucial role in enhancing accuracy and gaining wisdom. These insights will help you in improving your decision-making for efficient wealth management. An automated transaction IoT application in banking allows each payment transaction to be administered in real time. IoT allows a secure and monitored trading environment where all payment procedures are executed with intelligent sensors and connected applications.

• Proactive Customer Services
  The Internet of Things (IoT) technology helps banks predict customers’ needs through scanned data collected during their visits to banks. From data collection to offering services, the IoT improves the customer experience in the following ways.

• • It is possible to redirect the clients to a free counter or notify them of the total waiting time to improve their task management efficiency.
  • A beacon-based system enables the bank clients to search for the nearest branch in a different city or country;
  • Branches can share user data immediately to offer a quick and personalized experience in any location;
  • Banks can start functioning without any human intervention.

5. Robotic Process Automation (RPA)

The banking industry emphasizes intelligent automation to drive efficiency, eliminate repetition, and improve customer satisfaction with quick services. The technology responsible for this automation is called robotic process automation (RPA).

With RPA, the bank can use customer service bots to deal with low-priority questions from customers like account balance checks, payment queries, and so forth, and save the time of human agents to deal with high-priority concerns. It will improve productivity, lower operational costs, and the probability of errors. It is possible for users to make a quick decision for their credit card application with RPA without any human intervention in the process.

Some essential benefits of RPA in the banking industry are as follows.

• Cost reduction: The cost of robot software is about one-ninth of a full-time employee in an onshore location. The cost of employees gets reduced by hiring a robot.
• Accuracy: Robots are programmed to follow instructions with great precision and productivity. Hiring a robot can uplift the accuracy level up to 99.5% as compared to humans.
• Performance Efficiency: Robots are faster than humans at executing tasks. Therefore, RPA automates standard banking tasks like customer onboarding processes, account opening, and loan processing to a certain extent.
• Compliance: RPA can increase the compliance levels of monitoring and testing. RPA’s has the potential to collect and fetch data from multiple sources. Thus, it enhances the efficiency of regulatory, non-financial, and risk-reporting tasks.

6. Augmented and Virtual Reality (AR/VR)

Innovative technologies like Augmented and Virtual Reality enhance the customer experience across the banking industry. AR / VR technologies enable complete autonomy for customers to execute transactions from their homes. For example, the Commonwealth Bank of Australia adopted an augmented reality application for customers willing to buy or sell a home. It gives the bank information like current listings, recent sales, and the price budget to help the customers make better decisions.

Virtual banks are also gaining traction by creating an artificial ambiance to connect with customers remotely. The virtual facility allows banks to provide customers with a complete banking experience, including interactions and transactions. Virtual branches eliminate the need for finding space to open a physical component and help eliminate the operational cost associated with the unit.

Digital transformation in banking is a costly set of measures regarding customer management, business-process automation, offering newer payment methods, and more. The banking industry needs to consider this and prepare the resources required to successfully implement emerging technologies. With so many competitors in the market, the only winning point is to monitor the recent trends and implement them better. Get immense benefits and improve business results by keeping in mind the latest technologies.

Are you also looking to encash the benefits of digital transformation? Contact our experts, and we will help you integrate digital technologies in building your financial solution. Our fintech experts understand the technical requirements of this industry and have the skills, experience, and in-depth knowledge to provide top-quality banking solutions with flawless results.