We believe that hyper-personalisation is imperative for banks, enabling them to respond to customers’ manifest and latent needs. Hyper-personalisation can be defined as harnessing real-time data to generate insights by using behavioral science and data science to deliver services, products and pricing that are context-specific and relevant to customers’ needs. This challenge has been exacerbated by COVID-19, as central banks around the world have scrambled to cut rates. Over the medium term, banks vertically-integrated business models face disruption, as evolving customer needs are increasingly being met by innovative newcomers that are picking off some of banks’ most profitable lines of business, like payments and foreign exchange. Now banks must become more like corporates. In the past, banks’ success rested on mastering a small number of capabilities, namely credit allocation, capital management and operations. There was little differentiation between various banks’ product offerings, and limited understanding of customer needs. We believe that, in future, banks will have to understand customers much better, and to develop the marketing and branding skills that would enable them to foster an emotional connection with customers. These competences are commonplace in other sectors, such as fast- moving consumer goods and retail industries.

The banking industry has been making steady technological advances and the Banks have been investing very heavily in going digital over the last decade. Most of these digital investments have been around omni-channel convergence, big data, analytics, customer journey mapping, user experience, chatbot and other self-service capabilities. Cloud adoption is still nascent in the Financial Services industry, and Financial Institutions are gradually moving forward with their plans to migrate to the cloud. Today, most banks boast digital features that help their customers conduct basic banking remotely, using a browser or a mobi.