Digital banking
Is digitalisation changing our horizons?
Having revolutionised banking before 2020, digitalisation has been given a colossal boost by the pandemic. From customer payments to internal communications, institutions from Lisbon to Moscow are rushing to embrace new technology. But what does this sort of transformation actually look like in the fi eld – and more to the point, how does it get done? Andrea Valentino talks to Finja Carolin Kütz, the group chief transformation offi cer at UniCredit, about what the Italian bank has cooking and why getting expertise from outsiders is vital to success.
he year 2020 was one of digitalisation. And why not? With lockdowns and social distancing making physical contact impossible – if not actually illegal – whole industries have rolled up their sleeves and adopted an alien vocabulary. Zoom. Agile. Cloud. If you can imagine it, there’s probably a start- up offering it, from virtual pub quizzes to happy hours with colleagues thousands of miles away. If nothing else, this is reflected in the numbers. According to work by BDO Global, for example, 51% of internet users are watching more online shows than they were before the pandemic. Netflix alone saw 16 million new sign-ups in the first quarter of 2020. And where digitalisation goes, jobs often follow. According to one study, the rise of digital economies could create six million jobs worldwide between 2016 and 2025 – and that’s in the logistics and electricity industries alone.
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Though it’s probably less sexy than Netflix and chill, similar growth can also be seen in the banking sector. Once again, even a cursory look at the statistics is revealing. By November 2020, for instance, European banks had seen a 72% rise in the use of their fintech apps since the start of the pandemic. These changes are particularly clear among young people. Nearly 30% of under 35s believe that the coronavirus has fundamentally changed how they look after their finances, compared with just 17% of older people. Naturally, all this is shadowed by work at specific banks. In Paris, bosses at Societe Generale recently launched a vast campaign of digital transformation, complete with a €150m start-up budget. At HSBC, meanwhile, new technology is touching everything from payments to liquidity.
Not that the path to banking digitalisation is straightforward. From legal challenges to the constant threat of security breaches, even the largest banks have to take care not to go too far, too fast. Yet with
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