Transactional banking is no longer the cornerstone that marks a customer’s banking experience. Irrespective of whether the customer touchpoint is in a branch location, internet banking or mobile banking through a phone or tablet, customer experience is crucial to improving loyalty and driving revenue generating opportunity. Transactional experiences are no longer viable on their own to hold an effective, long term customer relationship.

It’s interesting when the untraditional take on the very traditional retail sector keeps repeating itself with aplomb. Throughout 2016 we’ve been identifying and publishing key retail tech trends on our retail blog. We’ve observed several themes repeat themselves month on month. Nevertheless, the opportunity to gain competitive advantage through the use of trending technologies has catapulted this industry into the limelight.

The smouldering remains of recent digital transformation programmes such as the DWP Universal Credit, Home Office E-Borders and CAP-D, the regional payments agency all have common points of failure. They suffered from a lack of strategic business vision, weak leadership, limited skilled resources,  the rise of a ‘no bad news’ culture  and focus on technology rather than on citizen experience.

As Jeff Bezos rightly said, “If we can keep our competitors focused on us while we stay focused on the customer, ultimately we'll turn out all right.” An isolated, unhappy customer experience can undo a brand reputation that may have taken years to build. Whether it is online, mobile or offline, digital technology is a key factor in creating a cohesive customer experience.

“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.

The numerous security breaches involving personal data have only served to raise the level of distrust that citizens harbour towards businesses and the public sector at large. It is therefore essential for government organisations to avoid security lapses and mitigate these risks by putting in place checkpoints such as Identity and Access Management (IAM) solutions. IAM solutions are pivotal in addressing security concerns, ensuring that citizen data is secure and used solely for legitimate purposes by authorised individuals.

Increasingly, the continuing health and wealth of organisations in the retail space is reliant on big data. There is a pressing need to not just analyse the information, but to appropriately leverage the wealth of business intelligence in order to manage customer expectations. This can be done by effectively extracting value from the information available and transforming this big data into big value.

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.

The UK government’s ‘digital by default’ agenda is here to stay. It is a long-term proposition aimed at providing easy to use, accessible public services. As the dependencies on ICT continue to increase, government departments have major IT changes planned.

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.