The bright smile of destiny has shone upon the United Kingdom in quite dramatic circumstances. And as a result, the vote to leave the European Union in June opens up a massive opportunity for the financial services business in the City of London to reinvigorate itself.
There is a lot of hype around blockchain technology. Yet, it has no live, large scale implementations within the financial services sector. The fact remains that blockchain holds great potential in transforming the way we do business.
Differentiators always fade away with time and new ones have to be identified or built continuously. Innovations provide businesses the advantage to leap forward against the competition, but only for a limited time. With advancement and adoption of technologies by end customers in their day-to-day lives, their expectations are increasing and they look forward to greater value delivered through digital channels.
On the face of it, the FCA’s (Financial Conduct Authority) focus on regulating the market whilst simultaneously promoting competition and innovation may seem like a Catch-22 situation for financial services businesses.
Financial Services organisations continue to struggle to regain the previous levels of profitability, being hamstrung by the slow pace of economic recovery, low interest rates, and regulators attacking their traditional fee income streams by driving increased competition in the market through vehicles such as PSD2, and demands that banks sell their dominant interests in areas such as Vocalink. To control costs many continue to look to retrench their business, divesting parts, shrinking others and tackling their internal cost base aggressively, but such cost focus is short term in nature and merely bring a breathing space which competition will exploit.
“In the absence of advanced business intelligence and rich customer data, banks develop and deliver digital banking transformation initiatives in the dark.”
This was a moment of truth statement made by the CIO of a retail bank during our discussion on business transformation in the banking sector. Yet, many line of business managers shudder at the very thought of data warehousing. Blame it on unfinished, monolithic technology programmes that failed to keep up with business change and delivered poor value. These were issues faced way before the onset of the digital age with its even greater demand for responsiveness and agility.
We’ve come a long way from the days of trading cattle for grain, haven’t we? Moving on from the barter system, we graduated to exchanging notes and coins, and now, to biometrics for digital payments. Payment verification technologies are expected to make quantum leaps in technology every decade. So, the day of the sci-fi sounding human wallet dawning upon us doesn’t seem very far.
Fraud is a malicious activity that if you don’t look for, you won’t easily find. And, when you do discover its detrimental effects, it might be much too late in the day when the damage has already been done. Fraud is especially rampant in the financial services sector where it is an on-going threat, both internally and externally. The LIBOR (London Interbank Offered Rate) interest rate fixing where banks falsely inflated or deflated their rates to profit from trades or to improve creditworthiness is one example. The more recent Payment Protection Insurance (PPI) outrage involving banks and other lenders wrongly selling PPI to customers is yet another scandal.