Challenger Banks 2021 | Future of Finance (FOF) | 26 May 2021 | Webinar

Open Banking and APIs have made it much easier for retail customers to change their bank. This has spawned a host of digital start-ups that aim to poach customers from traditional banks. But customer attrition might be only the beginning of a total transformation, for digital technology has the potential to do far more than change the way banking is done. It could change the very nature of money, securities and banking. At this Future of Finance Webinar, our expert panellists will explore with an invited audience how traditional banks and digital challengers can best position themselves to benefit from the coming revolution.

The modern retail banking customer prizes speed and convenience. So balance checks, spending alerts and instant payment through mobile apps and the web and, increasingly, voice-activated devices, are conditions of being in the banking business at all. But customers also want an experience that is personal without needing to get in touch with a call centre. That is hard to deliver at scale without powerful data aggregation and presentation tools and AI-driven chatbots that can actually take part in a natural language conversation. Using data analytics to understand the personal profile as well as the personal finances of an individual customer enables existing products to be sold more effectively, and new ones to be developed. It is of course much easier for a digital start-up to deliver these services than a traditional bank burdened with legacy technologies, daunted by the prospect of a prolonged, expensive and risky transition to a new platform and unable to attract the digital talent they need to change their culture as well as their business. But, despite everything they have got wrong, traditional banks do retain one advantage that start-ups lack: their customers trust them to keep not only their money safe but their data. If the traditional banks could transform their technology to match that of their digital challengers, and develop a reputation for offering impartial advice, they would remain highly competitive against even the FinTech unicorns. But that may mean taking risks not only with new technology but with emerging financial instruments – such as payment and security tokens and central bank digital currencies (CBDCs) – that threaten the entire structure of private and commercial banking as it has developed over the last 200 years.

Topics of discussion include:

• Matching the digital customer experience
• Developing new data products and services
• The question of trust
• Is there a case for real-time retail payment?
• The impact on systemic risk
• Prospects for central bank digital currencies (CBDCs)
• The future of crypto-currencies
• How payments market infrastructures (PMIs) can help banks adapt
• The pros and cons of net and gross payment
• The impact of legacy systems
• Inter-operability between new and old systems
• Talent recruitment and retention

2021 Speakers

PANELIST:

Ruth Wandhofer
Partner, Gauss Ventures

MODERATOR:

Dominic Hobson
Co-Founder, Future of Finance
2021 Sponsor

• Kasisto

2021 Sponsor

• Kasisto