Banks are continuing to spend money on branches, but they are dramatically changing their role to become centres for sale-oriented advice rather than service-oriented transactions, driven by the rapid growth of digital banking.
Italy’s Banca Popolare di Bari has chosen ATM manufacturer NCR to help it revitalise its branch network with a new set of systems that it says will help to cut queues and better connect with customers.
The Fairbanking Foundation, a non-profit charity focused on improving the financial health of consumers, has launched a drive to encourage banking providers to improve their products and achieve an additional 15 Fairbanking Mark certifications from the Foundation by October 2015.
The BBA has called for regulators to do more to improve competition in UK retail banking by making changes to the way payments, capital, access to funding and proportionality of regulation are handled and opening up more opportunities for challenger banks.
Banks need to do more to educate consumers about the ways in which they may be exposing themselves to fraud risks, according to a new report by Aite Group using data from ACI Worldwide, which notes that one in four consumers has been victimised by card fraud in the past five years.
A major new effort spearheaded by the Bank of England and the UK Treasury has been launched to shore up the cyber defences of the UK financial services industry, amid rising concerns that testing has exposed serious unaddressed weaknesses.
Turkish bank Yapi Kredi has partnered with mobile money specialist Monitise to develop branchless banking’ services in which the consumer can open an account and carry out all their transactions without the need for physical locations.
Despite falling costs, banks are continuing to charge “unjustifiable” fees that rip off retailers and consumers as they move away from cash towards debit cards and other forms of payment, according to the British Retail Consortium’s Payments Survey for 2013.
Kazakhstan’s Eurasian Bank has launched a mobile banking service which offers basic mobile banking features to Kazakh, Russian and English=speaking customers.
The speed at which the mobile market evolves is staggering. Just as we started to look at mobile first, where banks need to align their services and strategies to cater for mobile before desktop or other traditional channels, the notion of mobile-only is now creeping to the fore.
Given that bank customers are unlikely to increase significantly their usage of ATMs and now that opportunities to deploy large numbers of additional dispensers are limited, what does the future hold for the ATM and where does its next phase of growth lie?
Emirates NBD has launched a tablet banking service, which it says makes it the first bank in the Middle East to offer tablet-based financial planning. Launched for the bank’s priority banking relationship managers and wealth management advisors, the new apps allow them to access customer information using their tablets.
Swedish regional bank Swedbank is planning to roll out new ATM applications for 206 branches across the Baltic countries of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania. The company will also upgrade more than 150 of its ATMs as part of a new multi-channel banking strategy.
HSBC has installed free Wi-Fi in 650 of its UK branches, bringing the bank into line with Barclays, which introduced free Wi-Fi in February 2013. Both banks signed deals with BT to provide the connectivity, which is managed by BT as a white label service.
New UK regulator the Financial Conduct Authority has made a good start in its first year of life and has helped to contributed to a “sea change” in the way conduct is viewed and treated by financial institutions, according to Clive Adamson, director of supervision at the FCA.
Santander is emerging as the main beneficiary of the battle to attract UK current account holders while NatWest and HSBC are losing ground, according to the monthly TNS Current Account Switching Index data for April.
There is a danger that regulation will push financial services so far down the path of homogeneity that it hinders innovation and hurts customers, warns Robin Fieth, chief executive at the Building Societies Association.
Commercial Bank of Qatar has implemented a new tool from Experian into its credit risk team, which it says will help it to automate customer scoring and decision making on loans and credit cards.
Banking Group Santander has added m-commerce to its mobile banking and payment app, in a development it is claiming as the world’s first ‘superwallet’.
More than half a million UK consumers have switched their current accounts since September, according to new figures released by the UK Payments Council. The figures have been described as positive, but market observers remain cautious over whether or not they can be sustained and whether the UK authorities are doing enough to promote innovation.
Banks must take note of the way that technology is changing how customers interact with the world around them and develop products and services that address their needs rather than the banks’.
The banking industry is complex by its nature but banks and bankers should look up from their budgets, listen to their customers, stop whining about regulations and collaborate on industry issues.
UK consumers have doubled the amount of transactions they make on their mobile phones over the last year, according to new figures released by the BBA.
While established banks struggle with their legacy systems, smaller players and new entrants are quickly adopting new technologies – but there are some trends in digital banking that are being slowly adopted by the banking industry as a whole.
Mobility has risen to such a level of importance that many people believe it deserves its own C-level position to advance and align mobility strategy throughout the enterprise. In no other industry is this more pressing than in banking where financial institutions are increasingly using mobile apps to set themselves apart from their rivals.
A new financial services innovation centre in Indonesia is aiming to capitalise on rising levels of mobile penetration and interest from banks and other financial services providers in new technologies and business opportunities in the country.
The Bank of England has become the first central bank to go live with an implementation of the Market Infrastructure Resiliency Service contingency system it has been piloting with Swift over the past few years.
The mobile payments system planned by the UK Payments Council will be branded Paym. The Council says that it will announce the go-live date next month and final testing is on track.
TSB is increasing the size of its ATM estate by more than 10% as it works to transform its retail banking network in the wake of its de-merger from Lloyds Banking Group last year.
At the end of last year, Yahoo was hit by a malware attack. It affected over two million clients, mainly in Romania, Great Britain, France, Italy and Spain, putting their personal data at risk. Upon visiting the website between 27 December and 3 January, users received advertisements, some of which were malicious and infected users’ devices without even a click.
Mobile payment isn’t about reinventing the wheel – it’s about making merchants and customers’ lives better by establishing a relationship built on knowledge and trust, according to mobile payments platform Znap.
Bitcoin, gamification and Personal Financial Management are “generating more heat than light” in debates about the future of retail banking and banks should not be distracted from other major challenges including digital channels and legacy transformation.
Poland’s Getin Bank has implemented biometric signature verification in a roll-out of unstaffed remote branches using Virtual Teller Machines under its Getin Point brand. The technology allows customers to carry out banking tasks that require a signature without having to go to a traditional branch.
After many years of struggle, Mexicans may be about to snatch the crown of Latin America’s most promising financial services market from their Portuguese-speaking cousins in Brazil.
The Prudential Regulatory Authority has set out a series of requirements for non-EU banks who want to do business in the UK.
In addition to the regulatory system changes, what would the technological and infrastructure challenges of such a ruling be?
MasterCard has partnered with mobile technology specialist Syniverse under an audacious plan that aims at nothing less than “bringing mobile financial services to every single mobile user on the planet”.
What do taxis, the weather, mobile wallets and raincoats have in common? They are all potential variables in determining a person’s daily spend – and they provide a great opportunity for banks to use data to save customers money, according to Aman Narain, global head of digital banking Singapore at Standard Chartered.
Spain’s CaixaBank has developed an application for Google Glass, the futuristic and controversial new technology that is set to bring augmented reality to the masses when it launches later this year.
Revelations that Barclays customer data was being sold on the black market to corrupt City traders have caused the bank some embarrassment over the weekend– but the incident raises more questions than it answers, according to observers.
The acquisition of digital banking specialist IND Group will give Misys access to parts of its rivals’ customer base that it intends to exploit as it develops its offerings in the digital banking channel, while the closer integration of the IND capabilities will also shore up Misys’ defences against encroachment of its own ageing user base.
