Six Retail Banking Technology Trends for 2022

2. Expansion of Open Banking APIs

Open banking has become one of the major drivers of digital banking transformation, impacting technology and infrastructure investments, data modernization and decentralization strategies, fintech partnerships, and even reskilling programs. The primary beneficiary of these efforts will be the consumer, according to research done by the Digital Banking Report.

To prepare for this shift in the way banking will be done moving forward, banks and credit unions must determine the most appropriate business model that will meet their future business objectives. Then institutions must assess the capabilities required to deploy against the model selected and build partnerships with third party providers to make the strategy successful.

Need for Speed:

85% of financial institutions believe the greatest impact of open banking will occur in the next 5 years.

For some institutions, the decision may be to build a banking-as-a-platform (BaaP) model or a banking-as-a-service (BaaS) model to open doors for selling products and services to an expanded prospect universe. Open banking also provides the opportunity to streamline and automate back-office processes, build a stronger innovation culture and improve customer retention.

Consumers are increasingly demanding relevant, timely and personalized experiences that can save them time and money. The pandemic illustrated how well organizations in every industry could respond to the opportunity to bring technology and digital delivery together to meet consumer needs. In banking, traditional and non-traditional financial services providers can play an important role in creating open banking opportunities that can serve the institutions while also providing valuable customer experiences.

3. The Move to the Cloud

The majority of banking and financial services organizations have yet to deploy core systems to the cloud due to significant complexity and concerns over security, risk, governance and control. In fact, according to a 2020 IBM banking on open hybrid multicloud survey, “While 91% of financial institutions are actively using cloud services today (or plan to in the next nine months), only 9% of mission-critical regulated banking workloads have shifted to a public cloud environment.” This presents a significant opportunity gap.

To address the need for capacity and speed, banks and credit unions must look to cloud computing solutions to store data and support applied analytics. The result is increased customer insights, improved efficiency, enhanced innovation, greater agility, and a reduced risk of security or business continuity breaches. As an overarching organizational advantage, cloud solutions can augment human productivity, providing insights that can positively impact both front-office and back-office transformation.

Cloud Computing = Flexibility + Agility + Scalability:

Cloud-based infrastructure can help banking organizations react to marketplace changes in an instant.

It is imperative for financial institutions to replace outdated on-premise infrastructure that has become harder and harder to update and increasingly costly to maintain. More than ever, successful organizations must look for flexible, scalable solutions that are both responsive and efficient. The technology is now available to help smaller banks compete. Waiting to leverage these new solutions is not a winning strategy.

According to IBM, “Organizations have an enormous opportunity to leverage cloud computing to drive innovation and improve their competitive position. Cloud computing – whether private, hybrid or public – enables organizations to be far more agile while reducing IT costs and operational expenses. In addition, cloud models enable organizations to embrace the digital transformation necessary to remain competitive in the future.”

4. Intelligent Process Automation

According to McKinsey, roughly half of all existing work activities could be automated in the next few decades, as next-level process automation and virtualization become more commonplace. “By 2025, more than 50 billion devices will be connected to the Internet of Things (IoT),” McKinsey predicts. Robots, automation, 3D-printing, and more will generate around 79.4 zettabytes of data per year. This equates to opportunities for greater efficiencies and enhanced data for improved decisioning.

Process automation tools such as robotic process automation (RPA) and digital process automation (DPA) will continue to enjoy healthy growth in 2022 as financial institutions realize the benefits beyond improved efficiency.

More than ever, banks and credit unions realize that an excellent digital customer experience can’t be delivered without a digital-first back-office. This includes more efficient new account opening, customer onboarding and digital loan application management. For RPA to help with these deployments, financial institutions will need to support RPA with intelligent automation.

5. From Embedded Banking to Embedded Finance

The appeal of embedded banking is to provide an easy and seamless way to deposit, save, pay or borrow without leaving a non-financial company’s app. The result is the ability for non-financial firms to retain customers and increase the overall value of the relationship. According to McKinsey, “Companies of all types and levels of maturity – including retailers, telcos, big techs and software companies, car manufacturers, insurance providers, and logistics firms – are considering and preparing to launch embedded financial services to serve business and consumer segments.”

In response to the desire to embed finance within apps outside banking, leading financial institutions are working with fintech firms and non-financial companies to provide banking-as-a-service (BaaS) offerings. While some institutions see embedded finance as potentially threatening traditional banking models and control of current customer relationships, there is also the potential to participate in an estimated $230 billion market opportunity.

Consumers Want Simplicity:

“Consumers want to stay within an app to research, engage, buy and share experiences.”

The future of embedded finance can have positive implications. According to a research report from Plaid and Accenture, “Embedded finance can not only provide access to new markets, it can also reduce customer acquisition and servicing costs. In addition, an underlying benefit of embedded finance is that it offers ways to monetize without charging customers more, and therefore enables companies to eliminate barriers to adoption of their core offerings.”

“If an organization has the primary bank account for somebody, and that bank account is being connected to a lot of the financial and non-financial apps that exist across the ecosystem, the consumer is much more likely to continue using that organization as their primary bank account than if that’s not the case, stated Eric Sager, COO of Plaid in an exclusive interview on the Banking Transformed podcast.

In fact, the Accenture research found that for those already implementing embedded finance solutions, 70% said they are using partners, buying, or licensing technology as part of their embedded finance strategy. This illustrates the desire by non-financial firms to partner with legacy banking organizations.

6. Increased Focus on Cybersecurity

Cyber ​​threats have dire immediate financial consequences and threaten both the reputation and future business prospects for financial institutions. Security breaches can come from anywhere inside or outside the organization, with the use of mobile technologies and online data transmission creating increased threats of hacker attacks.

While cyber attacks increased significantly during the early days of the pandemic, the real damage occurred as financial institutions hurried to implement remote working and doubled down on digital banking transformation initiatives. Once-in-a-decade breaches (SolarWinds, Colonial Pipeline, Verkada, JBS foods, Kaseya) hit almost every news cycle. The importance of protecting customer information and critical infrastructure from cyber threats is only getting more urgent, while also becoming more difficult to counter.

One major trend that may gain traction will be the elimination of passwords. Humans are not prepared to generate and remember dozens (or hundreds) of unique combinations of characters that don’t resemble any spoken language.

Authenticator apps, Windows Hello, and SSO solutions are all reducing the need for passwords. Recently, Microsoft has allowed users to go passwordless by using their Authenticator app. While this won’t stop cyber criminals, it will certainly provide an added layer or protection as biomentrics are increasingly used.