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

Report

Personalisation-as-a-Service: Harnessing Data in the Banking and Payments Industry

A Finextra Research Impact Study in Association with FICO and Amazon Web Services (AWS). As customers increasingly experience more consistent, personalised treatment from companies across a wide variety of industries, it is natural for them to expect—and require—the same of financial services providers. Consumers do not want disjointed experiences across auto loans, credit cards, and HELOCs any more than they want them when shopping for different categories within the same online retailer. Aside from consistency, 84% of customers revealed that being treated like a person, not a number, is important when winning and retaining business. That’s according to Accenture Global Consumer Pulse Research, which also found that 73% of consumers expect specialised treatment for loyalty and anticipate rewards for past interactions, as well as for sharing their preferences or personal information. However, only 22% believe that customer experiences are tailored effectively by organisations, and 50% fewer consumers perceive their bank as a trusted partner today than in 2018. Thus, there is a significant opportunity for savvy financial services companies who can meet consumer expectations. At the same time, financial institutions that fail to satisfy those standards are in jeopardy, as customers are re-evaluating their choice of financial providers given an increasingly diverse and non-traditional range of alternatives. Ultimately, consumers want financial providers to offer personalised services and integrated offers that address their most relevant needs at the right time, such as when they are buying a car, getting married, purchasing a home, continuing their education, etc. The financial institutions that can anticipate customer needs and deliver service that is personalised and consistent across channels will be well positioned to thrive in the digital age. Download your copy of the Impact Study below to learn more.

30 October 2020 524 downloads

Report

How to Prevent Payments Fraud amid Global Disruption

Economists predict the disruption caused by the coronavirus pandemic will be felt well into 2021. Banks have been left vulnerable and have to contend with fraudsters who are using Covid-19 as an opportunity to commit financial crime, exploiting consumer fear and the increase in digital payments. Fraud losses need to be anticipated and prevented as banks move from the lockdown to the recovery phase. What must be done to ensure the secure use of alternative payment options? In the age of open banking and real-time payments, funds can be transferred to fraudsters’ accounts immediately and the victim does not notice suspicious movements until it is too late. It is evident that with faster payments methods, the benefits for consumers far outweigh the disadvantages, but hackers will continue to exploit this area. Fraud analysts within a bank must pivot and adapt to working in a new environment to ensure that teams integrate efficiently and decrease human error through a lack of physical communication. Data is a vital tool in a bank’s armoury and must be considered an asset. AI and machine learning can also play a part in fraud and financial crime prevention, consuming disparate unstructured data and creating structured insight and conclusions. Coupled with traditional fraud techniques, banks need to pivot their payments fraud strategy to a tech-driven approach. This research paper by Finextra, in partnership with Feedzai, gathers the views of several experts from Bank of the West, Barclaycard Payments, HSBC, ING, Nationwide and Nordea on how to prevent payments fraud during a pandemic. Download the full report below to find out more.

16 July 2020 635 downloads

Report

Should banks be the guardians of digital identity?

The single, interoperable digital identity will be a dominant technology trend over the next decade, within the financial services industry and more broadly in our digital economies. Often pushed by digitally-minded governments, there are digital identity schemes at all levels of maturity worldwide. And where they are already well established they have evolved differently in different markets over the past 20 years. Many of the best examples, that have delivered high population penetration and efficiency and security for consumers and businesses, have had bank collaboration at their heart. In these cases, banks have been able to leverage their trusted role in the economy, their technical expertise and experience with shared infrastructure, to drive a level of success in opt-in digital identity schemes that governments have not been able to achieve on their own. But banks can’t take their prime position in digital identity for granted. Even in countries where banks have already driven the digital identity agenda, regulation and market structure can change and new competition will emerge. In countries that are still formulating federated digital identity frameworks, or looking to expand government national ID schemes into private sector usefulness, banks also need to be aware that the big tech giants and other globally networked companies have serious potential to upend the global market for digital ID. If banks get digital identity right, they stand to realise benefits in streamlined sales processes and customer onboarding, reduced losses from fraud and regulatory fines, and the potential for new revenue generating identity-based products and services. But more importantly, they can maintain their central role as arbiters of trust and stay relevant in the transforming digital economy. Download the full white paper below to find out more.

24 March 2020 803 downloads

Report

The Irish Banking Ecosystem, Interconnection and the Speed of Change

Irish banks are operating in a rapidly changing market and must embrace new technologies and business models to keep pace and to stay ahead of energetic new entrants. But the same banks should accept that they cannot make this transformation alone and have to seek out new partners if they are to succeed or even survive in a new marketplace. The current trends towards open banking services, increasingly digitised products, and the appetite for real-time payments is playing out globally. In Ireland, where fintechs and big tech both reside in increasing numbers,the trend is especially acute. Many banks are adopting a cloud-based strategy to cope with new processing demands and to extract value from the increasing amounts of data, constantly generated from a myriad of remote devices. ‘Fast, agile and secure’ is the order of the day in order to join up the dots in the emerging ecosystem and be a frontrunner in the development of dynamic new products and services. The question is, can banks do it alone and what are the key ingredients for a successful partnership? Download the full white paper to find out more.

16 March 2020 413 downloads

Report

The Future of Cloud: Powering the Financial Services Industry

Strategic Insights and Best Practices for Success in the Cloud. The pace of change in the financial services industry is unprecedented. Regulatory oversight continues to expand with more stringent reporting and security requirements, emerging technologies are disrupting consumer expectations and the ecosystem is constantly evolving as new players enter the market. As a result, financial institutions are redefining their business models to deliver the capacity, agility and technology design they need to attract talent, be competitive and drive growth. From banking and payments to capital markets and insurance, cloud has become the new normal. In this paper, financial institutions, technology providers and consultants share their strategic insights and best practices for success in the cloud. From building a solid foundation to exploring the cutting edge, they discuss industry trends and specific use cases for stages throughout the cloud adoption journey.

19 February 2020 1001 downloads

Report

The Future of Cybersecurity: 2020 Predictions

2020 promises to be another politically-charged year around the world. Even with the possibility of any referenda in the UK now largely removed, the US election in November may bring to the fore cyber threats and the evolving methods of nefarious actors to interfere with business and government. Financial services companies will therefore be monitoring the cybersecurity space and evolving threats encountered and the methods used to mitigate them. In conjunction with experts of the financial services industry, Finextra explores trends to watch and predictions for cybersecurity in 2020 and beyond. Download your copy of the report now!

28 January 2020 721 downloads

Report

AI and Information Paving the Path to Personalisation

This report details the results of a survey on AI, onboarding and information readiness in financial services that was conducted online in mid-2019 by Finextra, in association with OpenText We had responses from 70 financial institutions, predominantly from retail and corporate banking groups, in 42 countries. While customer personalisation for guidance and communication is widespread in financial services (63% of respondents), moving beyond segmentation to true individualisation of product and service is not yet a priority. Only 9% of respondents ranked this first or second on an importance scale. AI is going to have an impact across many different parts of financial institutions, but 42% of respondents to this survey believe it is going to have the biggest effect on the value chain in the area of customer service and retention. But only if challenges around accessing data from disparate sources and growing management’s understanding of AI can be overcome. Just over half (58%) of respondents say they can today onboard new customers using only digital channels. Most of these digital-capable banks can complete onboarding processes in two days or less, but this was more likely for retail institutions rather than corporate banking divisions. Overall, 45% of survey respondents say they can complete onboarding of a new customer in 40 minutes or less. 80% of organisations say they aspire to exchange, integrate and leverage underutilised data sitting siloed inside their enterprise’s legacy applications. But the nature of these systems poses the biggest challenge to effective information governance. Download the full paper to find out more.

07 January 2020 464 downloads

Report

How European Retail Banks are Riding the Wave of New Technology

Retail banking is in the midst of change and technology is driving transformation, connecting physical and digital environments. Incumbent banks, challengers and neobanks are also focused on developing online and mobile banking services to meet the needs of the consumer, like the chatbot for retail customers, a conversational banking platform that most financial institutions (FIs) have launched. What retail banks are doing is challenging the status quo by adopting emerging technologies to combat issues that traditional financial institutions have faced for decades. This is just a drop in the ocean of the digital transformation that is to come.

18 November 2019 747 downloads

Report

The State Of AI In Financial Services

A small number of multinational top-tier financial institutions are already among the most world's most sophisticated users of enterprise-level artificial intelligence (AI). But while much has been written about the potential for AI to address business problems across the industry, adoption rates and the level of maturity vary widely. The journey usually begins with data scientists pulling together data sets for experimentation and finding insights and ideas to suggest to innovation teams and business units. From there it often progresses to obvious use cases such as improving money laundering surveillance and financial crime detection. Eventually, organisations are widening the context of their data through internal consolidation and enrichment with third-party data, and running models and decision engines across multiple functions within the organisation. Depending on the use case, these can deliver streamlined digital channel processing with automated decisions – or rapid presentation of context and insight for human-in-the-loop decisions. It is the evolution leading to large scale investment, adoption of AI approaches and return on this investment, that this survey sought to illuminate. How many institutions are at each stage of this evolution? What use cases are they focusing on and what challenges are they encountering along the way?

30 October 2019 946 downloads

Report

The Future of AI: Applications for banking business transformation

While artificial intelligence has established itself as a disruptive technology for decades, AI is at the peak of the hype cycle now and banks have started to apply this technology to transform traditional models of businesses. However, being a multi-faceted technology, financial institutions must decipher whether it is machine learning, robotics, deep learning, business intelligence, natural language processing or algorithms that are the most beneficial. While some banks launch chatbot applications and virtual assistants, others do not have the talent within the business to deploy innovative products that are personalised for their customers, and an even smaller number do not understand the value of AI. Finextra’s The Future of Artificial Intelligence 2019 report will explore how the financial services industry can leverage tried and tested experiments of AI in other industries to transform how transaction services can be reshaped. The report looks at how machine learning, deep learning and robotics could benefit banks and could improve customer experience and security, aligning decision-making factors with ethics to improve how a financial institution operates.

16 August 2019 858 downloads

Report

Utilising AI to Prevent Financial Crime

The convergence of open banking, data protection regulation, digitalisation of services and advancement of technology and artificial intelligence has caused profound and prolific changes to the financial services industry. It has also opened new doors and fresh opportunity for fraudsters, who are equally taking advantage of new technologies and the reams of data that now exists in the banking ecosphere. Keeping transactions secure as financial organisations move into a world of open banking is a race that gets faster by the launch of a new banking API. Risk management, cyber security and fraud strategists need to collaborate to stay ahead of the competition, while addressing the needs of the new digital customer, which includes the hefty task of protecting their data. Questions about liability in multi-party transactions and ever-increasing systems and protocols abound, as businesses transform to an end-state not yet known. New attack vectors in transactions and account opening come to the fore on a daily basis. How can banks utilise Machine Learning (ML) and AI in the fight against fraud in this real-time and fully digital marketplace With the emergence of open source technology, is there scope for data sharing to arm organisations with real-time information and anomaly detection? Could business functions communicate better internally to support the fight against fraud? This research paper by Finextra, in association with Feedzai, gathers the views of several senior data science and fraud experts from across the financial services industry on how to tackle fraud with AI as open banking and digitalisation continue to evolve.

09 May 2019 456 downloads

Report

AI - The Road to Transformation

The challenge for global financial institutions is how to navigate the Artificial Intelligence (AI) revolution in a successful manner. It requires a full evaluation of operational models, approach to the customer, ability to combine technological acumen with real business needs, and much more besides. At Finextra’s annual NextGen Banking London conference, speakers and panellists discussed how robotics can be deployed to automate processes and increase operational efficiency, and how advanced analytics can enable a better understanding of the customer allowing banks to improve their offering, remain competitive and also reduce fraud. Ultimately, AI is a tool with which to augment the workforce, and a cultural shift is also required in order to fully leverage the benefits to be gleaned from AI. Download this new paper produced by Finextra to find out more.

22 October 2018 132 downloads

Report

Capturing the AI Opportunity: Transforming Financial Services Technology and Culture

As part of the NextGen Banking London 2018 event, Intel hosted a roundtable that gathered together experts from a wide selection of the global banks to discuss the accelerating data-driven transformation in financial services due to artificial intelligence (AI) and the move towards a secure data and analytics platform it is working alongside partners to create. Under Chatham House Rule, what emerged during the discussion was a disconnect between the technology and business divisions and how some are broaching this. Download this new paper by Finextra and Intel to find out How are banks approaching AI? Who owns AI and what is driving it What are the challenges on the path to AI Implementation How banks can demonstrate the return on investment

31 July 2018 793 downloads

Report

The AI Revolution: Time to Get Ready

Artificial intelligence (AI) and related technologies are fast making inroads into the financial services industry. Operating in an interconnected, digital world in which money moves instantly, and faced with increasingly stringent regulations, financial institutions are turning to AI to help transform their operations. According to Forbes, organisations invest in AI developments to meet one of three objectives: Build systems that think exactly as humans do; Get systems to work without figuring out how human reasoning works; or Use human reasoning as a model but not necessarily the end goal. Download this new paper by Finextra in association with Intel to find out more on these three objectives and how AI will help financial institutions participate fully in the digital revolution.

31 July 2018 207 downloads

Report

Exploiting Big Data, Analytics and Visualisation for Better Decisions and Business Growth

Banks are in many ways the original data-driven businesses, generating huge volumes of transactions on an hourly basis. Coupled with the explosion of data points produced by digital and social media and ever-advancing technologies in other sectors, financial organisations have a great opportunity to streamline processes, reduce costs and utilise this data to achieve their business goals. This new paper by Finextra, in association with Qlik, brings together the views and opinions from a broad range of data experts from the financial industry on what needs to change from a business and technology perspective to enable banks to harness the power of big data, analytics and visualisation and to foster data-driven value. Download the paper to read about: How Natural language processing (NLP) will impact the flow of data and analytics ‘Navigate the noise’ and overcoming key challenges such as leadership Ensuring the technology is right from the ground up Customer regulatory compliance, security and risk strategies How increased data means increased risk

30 July 2018 539 downloads