Top 4 Banking Innovations in the World in 2017

Banking Innovations in the World

We are facing an era of innovations and technological advance that infuses great challenges in the banking industry. Start-ups and traditional financial institutions respond to these challenges by pushing boundaries and striving to provide the services, products, and experiences required by a digitalized world. 

The ultimate aim of innovations is to generate more value for consumers, to drastically improve their customer experience and meet their exigencies. And also, to sustain banks in increasing market share, expanding their revenues, strengthen client relationships and simultaneously cutting costs. 

Among the most prominent innovations in banking sector this year we count:

Marketing innovations

Banks start to replace the traditional advertisements with digital content marketing and use its powers to build trustiness and benevolence among clients. The main purpose is to stand out and differentiate in front of the competition and to emphasize the value that the respective bank has to offer. 

A relevant example is that of the mini-series of DBS Sparks- Singapore. They counted on real client stories to create authenticity and spread the episodes through YouTube. The 7 episodes series gathered more than 100 million views and more than 11 million engagements across targeted Asian markets. This approach proved to be an excellent vehicle to introduce bank’s services in underbanked markets.

Amelioration of User Experience and Delighting Clients

Financial institutions start to apply blockchain technology to tremendously improve user experience with banking services, by automating and centralizing the processes. 

KBC Bank from Belgium made a great demonstration based on car loans. They compacted the steps and actions in an automated flow in the system, from ordering the car still driving it home. And we're able to confirm the poor user experience in the classical way and the benefits that brings the new approach.

High Impact Improvements in the Business Ecosystem

The process of starting a new business, besides all engaged challenges, begins with a laborious bureaucratic endeavor that includes several visits to the financial institution, to the competent authorities and a bunch of forms to be completed. All these procedures may take, depending on the country, a couple of days or even months. 

Using an innovative approach mBank - Poland proved that it’s possible to compress the new business establishment procedures and shorten them to less than 10 minutes. Consequently, the official demarche of registering a new enterprise, together with state digital signature, opening the bank account and contracting accounting services could be reduced for almost 90% of new companies.

Financial Services Like Payments and Wallets Breach New Barriers

Innovations in retail banking tend to transform a shopper’s smartphone into an all-in-one “payment and checkout” device. The purpose is to spare consumer’s time and skip the queues for paying the items bought. The retail clients will pick the products, scan them, initiate a mobile payment and get out of the store without check out.

Barclaycard - the UK launched such an application that makes “invisible payments” using pre-loaded stored credit card details, after scanning products. If such type of payments is about to become the norm in the online world, the physical retail environment is just starting. 

This has the potential to revolutionize the retail physical shopping and eliminate the plastic credit cards from current usage, because of the mobile device provided value.

The above mentioned are just a small part of the challenges in banking industry that are cooking this year, some others will explode in the near future.