Regional focus
Right: Andrzej Sierpinski, managing director of mobile finance software company, FINANTEQ.
Far right: Lukasz Wiktor, director of the omnichannel department at mBank.
Opening page: The skyline of Warsaw, Poland’s largest city and both its political and economic capital.
Wiktor adds that banking in Poland, through its newness, skipped several stages of development. Certain products and services, such as cheques, have never been popular, and so people were able to quickly build trust in card payments and electronic banking. “mBank, as one of the pioneers in the market, offered ‘full digital’ banking more than 20 years ago, which is now a market standard,” he says. “The pandemic accelerated digitisation of the economy in Poland, and banking was ready to face this challenge.”
The start of digitisation
530 14
The number of active users of mobile banking apps in Poland.
European Banking Federation 12
The number of small cooperative banks in Poland.
million
While ‘full digital’ banking was about online banking early on, it was not long before smartphones came along. Andrzej Sierpinski, managing director at FINANTEQ, recalls that, when mobile banking first began in the 2000s, Polish banking was quite receptive. “There were and are excellent conditions for the development of digital banking in Poland – a large number of banking institutions, strong competition among them, the search for new areas of development by technological companies such as ours and, finally, the boom in smartphones,” Sierpinski explains. “More and more banks were [willing] to invest in new technologies, [and] demand for such solutions grew.” The upshot was that Polish banks took their first steps towards mobile banking earlier than many of their international peers. As a software company focused on mobile finance, FINANTEQ itself played a part in this transition. In 2007, the company signed a contract with Raiffeisen Bank Polska to implement its first native smartphone application. Over the months that followed, the app was reconfigured to suit different operating systems. “To my knowledge, the iOS banking app we developed for Raiffeisen Bank in 2009 was the world’s first mobile account access app for the iOS platform,” says Sierpinski. “Until then, banking services in smartphone browsers seemed to be the standard.
The industry was cautious about apps and did not believe they would be the future.”
Of course, it did not take long before attitudes changed. By 2011, two additional Polish banks had approached FINANTEQ for applications, with further projects soon following. “It was the moment when financial institutions began to believe that native applications installed on mobile devices are the future of digital channels,” says Sierpinski, “and that they can be used to reach customers where they happen to be.”
Recent innovations Today, digital banking is so entrenched in Poland that it is hard to remember a time when banks were sceptical about it. Almost every Polish bank now offers its own app, and user numbers are growing too. One study found that, in the first quarter of 2021, 38% of the Polish population used mobile banking – around half of whom managed all their finances via their smartphone. Most Polish banks have also signed up to BLIK – a country-wide mobile payments system. As of 2021, almost a quarter of Poles were active BLIK users. Many banks have also adopted m-commerce, for instance by allowing customers to purchase train tickets and parking spots through their apps. Several have implemented FINANTEQ’s e-commerce platform, Superwallet, enabling users to order taxis, buy tickets for events and purchase takeaways – all from the app. “Poland is a great place to develop new models for the global financial market,” says Sierpinski. “The market is changing all the time, digitalisation is progressing. Banks, still competing with each other, are experimenting, looking for new digital solutions. They are wondering how to reach out to new customers, how to make their offer more attractive to survive in an increasingly competitive environment.” A particular example here is Alior Bank, a self-styled ‘digital disruptor’ launched during the 2008 financial crisis. The bank has invested heavily in fintech
Future Banking /
www.nsbanking.com
SEB Banka
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