Finextra Research: Latest fintech news, analysis, interviews, features and opinion by industry experts

White Paper

Can FIs lead the World's ESG charge with Pioneering and Transparent Data Visualisation?

Financial Services are quickly adapting to the changing sustainability demands of customers and new regulatory frameworks. Regulation is being dramatically reshaped such that financial organisations become increasingly obligated to make consciously ethical investment decisions, becoming responsible for non-compliant ESG parties in their own value chains. However, different rules and formats apply in different countries, which causes significant compliance challenges. At the same time, the client or consumer is becoming more aware and more expectant of sustainable and green policies committed to by their financial service provider. Sustainable financing comes handy in the wake of both risks and opportunities. There is an urgent requirement to enable and provide a level of transparency to customers around ESG markers and data. An increasing need for firms to obtain quantifiable and comparable metrics to determine the sustainability and longevity of a business they may invest in or work with. Download this Finextra report, produced in association with Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Tata Consultancy Services (TCS), which takes a view on the rapidly unfolding story of ESG within banking and financial services at large.

30 June 2023 335 downloads

Report

Embracing Technology to shape the Future of Digital Banking

There has been a tidal wave of transformation - the pace of it is accelerating, technology is proliferating, and customer behaviour and expectation are advancing all the time; the banking industry is in flux and it is a challenging time but also an exciting one. To successfully navigate this evolving landscape, financial institutions must stay attuned to the changing needs and preferences of customers and embrace emerging technologies to adapt and rethink their existing business models. There are a few business models that have been developed and discussed over the years. Open banking has ushered in new platforms as well, acting as aggregators of banking services and connecting different players in the ecosystem. Given the trajectory in the last couple of years, with digitalisation efforts in banking services having been accelerated by the pandemic, there will be yet more banking models to form. The digital experience can be much developed; new platforms, marketplaces and ecosystems will undoubtedly be created, and payment methods, which ultimately underpin financial services and commerce, are likely to undergo further evolution too. Download your copy of this Finextra whitepaper, produced in association with Worldline, which explores the current landscape of models and what factors may influence further evolution.

20 April 2023 602 downloads

Report

Customer Experience - Is Hyperpersonalisation the next frontier?

An Inflection Point as Banks Invest to Improve Customer Experience A Finextra research survey, which was conducted in late 2022/early 2023, aimed to quantify priorities and ambitions in financial services with regard to improving the digital experience of services for the customer, and to what extent services have or will become personalised, or even hyperpersonalised. Financial institutions are prioritising investment in customer experience capabilities in what is seen as a key “inflection point” behind new IT-led growth initiatives, results from this primary research survey show. But feedback also reveals the challenges this objective brings, including legacy IT infrastructure and restrictions imposed by regulatory obligations around data storage and processing. The findings show a genuine and growing appetite by banks and other financial service providers to invest more in making customers’ online engagements easier and more fulfilling. Download your copy of this Finextra Survey Report, produced in association with SoftServe, to learn more.

06 April 2023 447 downloads

Sentiment Paper

Seeking Approval - Acquirers vs. Transaction Fraud

Transaction fraud monitoring lies at the heart of fraud prevention for acquiring banks, and while the effort in decreasing fraud rates has advanced significantly, so has the sophistication of fraudsters themselves. The emergence of AI within fraud solution models has come to the fore in recent years and along with it, newly realised appreciation of the value of transaction data, current and historic. Banks need to get to grips with processing and utilising these data to full advantage, to inform a robust and futureproof strategy which can both increase approvals and reduce fraud. For transaction monitoring solutions to drive value, serving both merchants and acquirers alike, intelligence on any given transaction needs to be issued in real time before the submission of authorisation. Approval rates, pricing, customer-centricity, and fraud rates are always going to be key differentiators in a very competitive market. Within these parameters, banks need to continually improve their service to remain competitive, while navigating the various tools and techniques that are rapidly emerging. Different business models prioritise different aspects of case management and scoring, using traditional rules-based methods and more data-led AI and ML approaches. This Finextra industry sentiment report was produced in association with Brighertion, a Mastercard company. It is based on several industry interviews, through which we aim to take a pulse on the industry’s general appetite for real-time, AI-driven, data-rich transaction fraud monitoring, and the various models, technologies, and priorities that shape acquirers’ anti-fraud strategies.

25 October 2022 464 downloads

Report

The Future of Digital Banking in North America 2023

A Money20/20 USA Special Edition 2022 in North America saw a continuation of economic recovery from the Covid-19 pandemic, fuelled by the rapid rollout of vaccinations particularly across the US and Canada. Although the US was the fastest of the G7 economies to recover from the crisis, an enduring impact of the Russia-Ukraine conflict resulted in high inflation and the subsequent cost-of-living crisis is set to continue into 2023. These macrotrends are a catalyst for digital transformation within the financial services industry as banks attempt to grapple with new payments trends, the evolution of digital identity and innovative uses of data to enhance customer experience across retail, wholesale and commercial relationships. In 2022, digital banking for the consumer is far more advanced than the products and services that are available for merchants or large corporations. In 2023, open banking must be utilised to remedy this issue. For the retail customer, although digital methods of managing money are now part and parcel of day-to-day life, the pandemic encouraged, or in some cases, forced people who may have been uncomfortable with using technology to bank on their mobile phones or desktop computers. This unfamiliarity with technology has led to consumers being in environments in which they are vulnerable and at increased risk of fraud and other types of financial crime. In 2023, banks will need to ascertain what they need to adapt and strengthen in fraud prevention while also managing new regulatory and compliance requirements. Further, the areas of onboarding that need to be automated must also be considered as part of a holistic digital strategy, striking the balance between innovation and digital noise. For instance, Web3, the metaverse, digital assets and tokenisation are no longer the monopoly of global tech giants, but are increasingly being shaped by financial players who are having their relevance threatened. This Finextra report, which features expert views from ebankIT, EPAM Systems, Infosys Finacle, and Trustly, will explore topics that impact the digital banking sector and those that will be covered at Money20/20 USA 2022 in Las Vegas. Additionally, key insights from Wells Fargo, Plaid, Green Dot, Silicon Valley Bank, FXC Intelligence, Synapse, Navy Federal Credit Union, Branch, Citi, and the New York State Department of Financial Services will cover how organisations across North America are preparing for imminent change across the digital banking landscape.

21 October 2022 1154 downloads

Report

SaaS: The case for building a new banking business model

Why is SaaS pivotal to tackling regulatory, competition, and technology challenges? Banks are no longer only interested in building their infrastructure in order to serve their customers the best they can. Rather, they strive to position themselves as the orchestrators of API platforms. Software as a Service (SaaS) deployment models are the ideal tool to reduce the struggles faced by banks as their role evolves. SaaS models are highly effective, as they target some of the key challenges banks face in their efforts to digitally evolve while remaining competitive. An increasingly demanding customer base, competition from agile digital players, regulatory burdens and legacy technology are four of these significant hurdles that can be mitigated using SaaS. Not only does SaaS assist in managing these challenges, it can also equip financial institutions with the toolkit required to thrive in the future. This Finextra impact study, produced in association with Temenos, explores how banks can best leverage technologies by third-party providers in order to mitigate industry pressures threatening their business model, adapt to shifts in customers' interaction behaviour, and improve their ability to remain competitive in an increasingly digital ecosystem.

03 October 2022 519 downloads

Report

The Future of Digital Identity 2022

Inclusive, Secure, Fit For Purpose Digital identity will be the catalyst for financial institutions wanting to navigate the data ecosystem in an increasingly sophisticated manner. In addition to an equivalent or replacement to physical identity documents, digital identity has also become a way to provide verified personally identifying information (PII) for software to read and process. Alongside this, over time, digital identity is also being utilised to enhance privacy protection and reduce financial crime through authentication. While biometrics are now part and parcel of life in 2022 – with the prevalence of mobile payments with Face ID and Touch ID – the concept of real-time and frictionless processes is what is driving the future of digital identity forward. According to the World Economic Forum, good digital identity has five key components. These five components form the basis of this report: Useful Inclusive Secure Offers choice Fit for purpose With expert views from CGAP, Citi, EPAM Continuum, HSBC, KPMG, London School of Economics, Loughborough University, The Purple Tornado, and the United Nations in this report, you will learn from industry leaders about the events and trends defining digital identity in 2022 and beyond.

06 May 2022 1077 downloads

Report

The Future of Regulation 2022

From Innovation to Execution The fire for innovation in financial services has long been raging, and regulators, having transformed their modus operandi to keep pace with the force of technological change, are carefully approaching their role in the great rewiring of the financial system. The fear once invoked by terms like artificial intelligence, cloud computing, or data sharing, has been relegated to the past, and the role of technology in the future of financial services is now accepted as being intrinsic to its success. With Open Banking reaching new realms of maturity, players have begun questioning how best to measure its success in a post-pandemic world. While Open Finance edges ever closer to pulling all focus away from the original Open Banking objectives, innovators are looking for ways to unbridle all pretence tied to our traditional view of what finance should achieve. Instead, they are placing impeccable user experience at the centre of their offering. This unbridling is also becoming apparent in the burgeoning appetite for decentralised finance offerings by retail and institutional investors. Central bank digital currencies (CBDCs) inject another layer into this mix, as central banks and governments carefully weigh up the advantages and risks of diving straight into the opportunity they present. Regulators are caught in the middle of these rapidly evolving trends and forces, attempting to stay the regulatory course by ensuring stability and security, while also motivated to remain at the forefront of this technology. Resilience has never been a more important focus for regulators, who are shifting responsibility directly onto market players to ensure strength across intertwined systems. Selecting a handful of areas tied to fintech that are either ripe for, or undergoing seismic regulatory evolution, we’ve compiled a wealth of insights from industry experts who have shared their views on the changes we can expect in 2022. This new Finextra report features commentary from industry experts across a breadth of financial, technology and regulatory firms, which include contributions from Accenture; A&O Consulting; Bird & Bird; Change Gap; Coutts; Herbert Smith Freehills; Hogan Lovells; Plaid; Proskauer; P2 Consulting; McDermott, Will & Emery; Noll Historical Consulting LLC; Société Générale; State Street; and The DPO Centre.

07 February 2022 1112 downloads

Report

Future-Ready Payments Solutions: Remaining competitive with reusable technology

Over fifty years ago, when the original payment pioneers built electronic funds transfer (EFT) platforms to enable card services, they had a single use in mind. Reliable and secure card payments were achieved, but the architecture was so closely bound to card transactions that it is now becoming incompatible with today’s colourful payment universe. As mobile and contactless payments, Quick Response (QR) codes, digital currencies, Request to Pay (R2P), Real-Time Payments (RTP), Buy-Now-Pay-Later (BNPL) and peer-to-peer (P2P) payment applications take off, banks are forced to build separate in-house silos, in order to process these new payment types. Given a plethora of dedicated systems are already in place to process cash, cheque and card payments, management of these silos and ‘add-ons’ is becoming a complex undertaking. Forward-looking banks are tackling this challenge by deploying modern payments platforms that are comprised of a set of re-useable services. These have the capacity to not only consolidate numerous payment schemes onto a single platform, but they can also future-proof businesses by facilitating easy adoption of new payment types. As the payments race heats up – and banks wrestle with the emergence of new digital currencies, payment instruments, funding methods and payment types – those with the most agile, secure, and reusable platform will be rewarded with a strong competitive edge and improved margins from being able to control when, how deeply and how long to take part in any new payments venture. Download your copy of this Finextra impact study, produced in association with Diebold Nixdorf, to learn more.

09 December 2021 788 downloads

Report

Don’t go extinct - How Wealth Managers can remain relevant

Transformation drivers and actions to prioritise Until recently, the wealth management industry in the UK has been largely homogeneous, with most traditional firms offering similar products and services to similar customers under similar business models. Fintech has been chipping away at these norms for a few years, but even in 2021, traditional wealth managers with rudimentary digital tools still dominate the market. However, the pace of change has accelerated in the last year. Newcomers are arriving in droves with engaging customer experiences, new technology and convergent services that address the historical limitations of the wealth industry, while opening new doors to new opportunities. Now Covid-19 has put the industry into the spotlight, exposing some enduring weaknesses and highlighting the need for modernisation. In a post-pandemic world, wealth management companies that are willing to innovate will begin to pull sharply away from those that are stuck in the past. Everyone hoping to remain relevant in this space - banks, advisory firms, asset managers, investment managers and technology providers - must be ready to drive transformation or risk extinction. Download your copy of this Finextra impact study, produced in association with Cognizant, to learn more.

29 November 2021 336 downloads

Report

The Future of Wealth Management 2022

A sector at the beginning of its digital renaissance. Increased digitisation of goods and services throughout the 2010s gathered pace long before Covid-19 turned the global outlook on its head. The pandemic served only to reaffirm this shift to digital as a matter of urgency. The wealth management sector was not spared the upheaval; however, it appears to be emerging from the crisis with an invigorated sense of progress. The disruptive forces of digitisation and Covid-19 are now joined by a groundswell of consumer expectation. This is clearly witnessed in the soaring uptake of retail investment tools and applications, greater access to financial instruments and widespread revolt against the traditional inaccessibility of financial services. This report, the Future of Wealth Management 2021 with interviews from Accenture, Coutts, Hargreaves Lansdown, Nutmeg, Oxford Risk, Tilney Smith & Williamson, and UBS Global Wealth Management will explore the forces currently shaping the industry. It will examine not only what these forces are, but how and why they form the structural foundation for a sector which is at the very beginning of its digital renaissance.

10 November 2021 1111 downloads

Report

Addressing the Poverty Premium: A data-led approach

Poverty premium is a term that means so much more than being charged more for certain products and lack of credit history; it can also equate to digital exclusion. With an increasing focus on environmental, social and governance (ESG) agenda, banks do not wish to be seen to be as socially irresponsible. Regulators and authorities are increasingly turning their attention to these issues as well, understanding that the poverty premium is a roadblock to regional and national economic progress. Banks therefore need to find ways to offer more nuanced services, so that fair banking is open and accessible to everyone. And this ultimately works to their advantage as well. Not all of the demographic that is let down by digital services is poor - think millennials without a credit history, or older baby boomers who aren’t digitally savvy- but by being unbanked or excluded from the system, can easily follow a downward spiral and end up badly off. There is scope and opportunity for banks to provide digital educational and coaching services as well, to bring people on board, better educate them and of course, avoid certain pitfalls. With shrewd capturing, processing and analysis of data and technology, banks can take the lead by addressing the tired bias that exists in traditional credit decisioning models against certain credentials or attributes, which is often a result of programming by human bias. Through open banking and shared data, particularly as this theme trickles into other sectors such as energy, insurance and healthcare, fintech startups and neobanks are already driving change in this respect. Download your copy of this Finextra white paper, produced in association with Cognizant, to learn more.

05 November 2021 296 downloads

Report

Five Factors to consider when building Operational Resilience

The term resilience is receiving a significant amount of airtime in 2021. While the pandemic certainly pulled into focus the need for resilient systems across financial services, the push toward financial resilience was first born in response to the 2008 financial crisis. Since 2008, focus has shifted toward building resilience across operations in the financial services sector, by assessing vital business functions, setting levels of tolerance that these functions can withstand, and testing the tolerances at regular intervals. The Basel Committee on Banking Supervision defines operational resilience as the ability of a bank to deliver critical operations through disruption. This ability enables a bank to: Identify and protect itself from threats and potential failures; Respond and adapt to – as well as recover and learn from – disruptive events. Unlike typical risk management or more traditional compliance-based approaches, when it comes to operational resilience, banks should assume that disruptions will occur – and consider their overall risk appetite and tolerance for disruption. In the context of operational resilience, the Committee defines tolerance for disruption as the level of disruption from any type of operational risk a bank is willing to accept, given a range of severe but plausible scenarios. While the ability to predict which areas are likely to cause disruptions was once the purview of a human supervisor, given the shift to digital operations, it is only logical that firms employ tools such as artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) to identify patterns and risks within an institutions’ complex technology systems. This Finextra impact study, in association with BMC, outlines five key considerations that financial institutions must be aware of, ahead of impending regulatory deadlines, as well as the technology-based solutions available to assist them in building a robust and compliant operational resilience strategy.

12 October 2021 252 downloads

Report

Competitive Advantage through Cloud Connectivity

Why NaaS is the smartest path to realising Financial Services Innovation in the Cloud. Many financial services firms are still making the shift from their legacy environments to more agile ways of consuming and running IT. Networking is one of the most critical aspects of this transition. It’s the backbone that connects all parts of an organisation and its data, as well as its wider ecosystem of partners, providers, and customers. The speed, reliability, and flexibility of the network directly impacts financial players’ pace of innovation, as well as their ability to provide highly available, customer-centric services. The challenges and limitations of traditional networking are clear in our virtualised, cloud-enabled, data-driven world. It’s slow to provision, expensive to maintain, lacks flexibility and integration, and can’t scale effectively to handle big data sets and analytics workloads. The need to modernise and simplify networks is an imperative for financial services organisations as their infrastructures become more complex and they develop their multi-cloud and hybrid-cloud strategies to support business transformation. Network-as-a-Service, or NaaS, enables financial services organisations to maximise the potential of the cloud as part of their digital transformation. It provides the future-proofed networking foundation that allows innovation and competitive differentiation. Download this Finextra impact study, in association with Megaport, to learn more.

06 September 2021 173 downloads

Report

SMEs Front and Centre

How business needs are driving (Instant) Payments Innovation. According to the World Bank, Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs) and businesses account for the majority of commercial companies worldwide and are important contributors to job creation and global economic development. Contributing up to 40% of national income in emerging economies, they represent about 90% of businesses and more than 50% of employment worldwide. SMEs will play a particularly important role in the post-pandemic future as human ingenuity and the need to secure a living income will drive new enterprises forward. Technology will be a vital part of that process, with entrepreneurs looking for new ways to meet customer needs for products and services. The opportunity for financial institutions will be to harness the potential created by the growth in SMEs with modern payment rails, and providing value-added services that reflect the needs of the evolving SME segment. Rather than the current product-centric approach, financial institutions need to find ways to establish themselves at the centre of how a business operates, not just enable it to pay or be paid. As payments capabilities are commoditised, FIs’ income from providing such services is eroded over time, making it even more compelling to understand and serve their business clients’ needs. The key is to understand how very different SMEs operate, and what they expect from their FIs. SMEs increasingly are disposed to rely on software-as-a-service (SaaS) models to run their businesses, whether that’s cloud-based finance or outsourced HR and payroll services. They don’t have the large data centres, in-house experts, or technology infrastructures that large corporates invest in, but they do have the same technology needs to support their business and to use data analytics to take the uncertainty out of their financial futures. This white paper from Finextra, in association with Fiserv, will focus on the problems and challenges SMEs grapple with, and how they can operate more effectively when armed with the right toolkit. Such use cases will demonstrate the products and solutions FIs can create with the power of instant payment rails and overlay services.

10 August 2021 524 downloads