Technology is evolving at an unprecedented pace today and disrupting almost every aspect of business and life itself. For the banking sector, the technology challenge is twofold. First, there is the question of digital transformation itself. For organizations operating in this sector for decades, this is no mean feat. It not only involves the digital transformation of legacy infrastructure but a fundamental change across processes, systems, practices, methodologies, distribution, pricing, rewards, products, customer service and more. Banks must execute this change without disrupting business as usual and without compromising security. The second challenge is of incorporating mega trends in the business. This includes emerging technology trends like Artificial Intelligence (AI), and blockchains. AI is already making inroads into banking by way of process automation and data analytics. In the future, it will be even more tightly integrated into the business by way of leveraging data better to improve pricing, rewards, customer services, sales cycles, closure rates, process insights and more. Blockchain too is finding increased resonance within the sector in the form of security and fraud detection strategies, currencies trade and more. Banks can find themselves overwhelmed as they try to transform and adopt technology trends. When establishing a technology strategy, it is important to remember that technology for technology’s sake is pointless. At the end of the day, technology needs to solve business problems, and therefore technology heads and business heads must jointly create a comprehensive technology strategy for the bank of the future.
