Top trends in banking 2016

By Neeraj Kumar Swansi

It’s the time of the year when already speculations are rife on experts’ prediction about what’s the next big thing in banking.

Here are my picks of what 2016 will have in store for the banking industry.

Business processes optimisation will gain spotlight, with prime focus on:

• Integrated architecture and BPM approach to manage operations
• Reduction of siloed approach and focus on application portfolio assessment and rationalisation
• Uniformity across the borders – Uniform user experience with reduced SLAs
• Distribution points to balance customer needs across channels with high optimisation

IoT – New wave of disruption ahead for the industry for good

By 2020, there will be a staggering 75 billion connections within the vast network of smartphones, appliances, manufacturing equipment and wearables. Banks that get ahead of the curve in their technology adoption today to improve customer experience engage their audience better and boost productivity will be tomorrow’s market leaders. The financial services industry will most likely be active participants in this transformation of the IoT enabled journey. Potential areas where IoT will gain traction:

• Payments – Self enabled devices with embedded smaller payments ecosystem
• Commercial mortgage – energy usage, environmental comfort, and security
• Improved branch experience – Video tellers/kiosks, virtual agents and digital assistants for smarter self-service
• Risk management

Omni channel banking – Need of the hour for every bank

Omni-channel banking is already starting to take shape today, though the full omni-channel experience is not with us yet. Omni-channel experience will be a key commercial differentiator for all the FSI towards guaranteeing the delivery of a seamless, connected customer experience with real-time transaction monitoring and analytics.

Banks internally also will benefit from the omni-channel shift in the following areas to optimise their applications and channels:

• Proactively manage customer transaction performance across all banking channels
• Have a good view into product behaviour across all banking channels
• Monitor third party hosted switches and integrated applications across all banking channels

Digital banking/mobile app (distinctive features) will continue gaining momentum

With increased penetration of the internet connectivity the digital banking adoption is rising and it will continue rising for sure across geographies. Various emerging markets in Asia are seeing increase in the digital banking customer base with majority coming from millennial segment.

The trend toward digital banking is unlikely to stop, even as factors such as regulatory obstacles and, for some consumers, a personal affinity for physical branches work against it.

Call centres optimisation – Key factor for cost saving and efficiency gain

Call centres are here to stay; they are not going to be obsolete in near future, the investment on call centres to be made is a question of investment vs ROI. Business processes and workflow management optimisation is going to yield more agility and maximum optimisation of the processes.

Virtual contact centre needs to deliver best available agents, wherever they are located. It provides monitoring of web behaviour and proactively offers customers assistance via chat, co-browse or call back to minimise interrupted transactions, delivers assistance via mobile applications enabling customers to directly access mobile service and supports through voice (without the IVR), chat or email, while informing you with context, location and historical data. Managing the back office more effectively by taking control of workload distribution, providing management insight and optimising the workforce are the low-hanging fruits banks needs to target.

Data usage is going to be paramount and will be a differentiator in the long run

Banks hold tremendous amount of data about their customers, but 2016 could be a breakthrough year for putting it to work. 

Risk management is one of the hottest areas and data analytics will be adopted to improve the user experience and operations optimisation. 

The tools help banks offer customers more personalised and customised services and products. Data and analytics will play a pivotal role in building the next generation of digital platforms. However, real-time use of data analytics will act as the key differentiator.

2016 is much likely to bring new dimensions to the way banking is done. Looking forward to exciting times ahead..

This article was originally posted on Virtusa’s blog –

http://www.virtusa.com/blog/2016/02/top-trends-in-banking-2016/

(The writer is Senior Consultant – Banking and Financial Services at Virtusa. He has worked with a variety of clients from different industry verticals but has a special focus and experience in the banking and financial services industry. For nearly five years, he has been involved in delivering transformational solutions for banking technology companies in addition to also supporting banking and financial services companies in implementing solutions across different products and platforms including those for corporate banking, retail banking, project finance, foreign exchange, payments and risk management. He has worked with Credit Card providers to improve their operational efficiencies, time to market and effectively handle customer disputes by streamlining the case management capabilities to enhance the overall effectiveness of the case and dispute resolution processes. He holds an undergraduate degree in Mathematics from St. Xavier’s and MBA from IIM Calcutta.)