I’m currently in a workshop in the Sogeti France HQ, Paris, on the topic of the future of digital banking. One of the benefits of working in a larger consultancy group is the value we can bring to our customers when sharing experiences and insights from projects delivered in countries like the US, the Netherlands, France, Sweden and Ireland. Colleagues in consulting and technology services are sharing market trends and best practices. It’s clear that digital banking is much more than the bank going online or social, or internet banking going mobile.

Some of my personal reflections are that for the user, digital banking is about getting relevant real-time contextual functionality and information to spending and saving in several dimensions including time, geography, user, and so on. You may associate this to Personal Financial Management (PFM) in your phone and it’s an obvious online banking feature and it’s one of the “usual suspects” in any digital banking workshop, but it’s reactive in nature (and few banks even do that on any relevant level).

Mobile solutions are teaching us about real-time context, which sometimes even pushes insights to the user without the user having to manually request it. Real-time context means giving the user immediate insight and understanding on type of spend, consolidated spend at this particular merchant or location, ability to move money to friends and family (or just people), “gamificated” status versus budgeted spend and save, and so on.

Fundamental features of digital banking are:

  • process agnostic and insight based money movements
  • truly mobile payments and savings
  • intensified connections between the user and the user’s money
  • highly customized cross selling based on historical data, contextual information including location, time and so on
  • contextual, social and conversational customer service
  • … and any feature that gives the user an increasing level of real-time insights and control

Successful digital banking addresses challenges in a wide array of aspects including a rapidly changing banking and financial services ecosystem, regulations, open data, security, business/IT alignment, time-to-market, widening innovation scope, quality assurance, quickly evolving technology solutions, legacy system transformation and integration, the Internet of Things, customer service, and of course client platform and form factor evolution.

From today’s workshop we return back to our local customers with a clear list of actions, updated visions, methodologies, awareness of technology solutions, and new professional connections, geared up to continue adding transformational drive and offerings. So, if you are in the banking industry, please contact me and I’ll be happy to come and visit you, to listen to your specific objectives and provide the full spectrum of today’s findings!