The COVID-19 pandemic has left Australia in an environment of low interest rates and reduced stability in earnings caused by government-imposed lockdowns, strategic business changes such as operations, budget cuts and redundancies that affect daily operations and budgets and employment, as well as changes in economic trends; these trends majorly affecting sectors including travel, finance, brick and mortar retail and hospitality, with flow-on effects within the broader economy.

With competition emanating not only from fintechs but also leading technology companies, it has become extremely difficult to grow or even maintain margins. The banks have the advantage that they have the customer base, however the advancement in technology is reducing the barriers to offer different financial products by fintechs and technology companies. We have already seen the proliferation of a variety of players in the payments space offering digital wallets, merchant services, payments rails, for example. PayPal, Square, Stripe, etc. The same is happening within the credit space with buy now pay later firms popping up, technology companies like Apple offering cards and even retailers offering their own credit facilities, thereby eating into the margins of the banks. Even Google has plans to introduce checking and savings accounts in tie-ups with banks. Smaller banks, at times are further disadvantaged especially in terms of funding available to invest in technology and innovation.

Whether it is personalised content on your social media feeds, instructing Alexa to change the song or using FaceID to gain access to encrypted details on your smart phone, Artificial Intelligence (AI) is something we can no longer ignore and in some cases, we can’t imagine living without it.

In the machine learning, at least for some classes of problems, a predictive model is built based on training the dataset where the outcome is known, and the same model is then used to predict the outcome from actual input data. The model may be further refined when larger numbers of data with known outcomes are available, or in a continual fashion, when a 'training' occurs on an incoming data for which the current model has failed to predict the correct outcome. I.e. the data point that has been 'trained' enlarges the training dataset thus occasioning the model to be rebuilt considering one more datum points with known outcomes, than was previously available.

Covid-19 has significantly transformed our lifestyle on multiple fronts. From the way we do our professional work, go about our daily responsibilities to planning or managing finances, we all have been pushed to adopt digital technologies. ATM cash withdrawals and footfall at physical bank branches are down, whereas e-commerce and contactless payments have increased significantly. A recent article in the Sydney Morning Herald, pointed out that the ATM usage in recent months has plunged by about 40% in volume compared with last year, while branch traffic fell about 50% from February to April. Contactless payments, in contrast, are up about 65% in value. Australians are showing a greater preference for contactless payments during the Covid-19 pandemic, according to debit card provider Eftpos which is claiming 400% growth of its mobile payments business.

Imagine if all financial data could be moved around like trains with pre-defined carriage content on a standard gauge. With financial transactions forming the backbone of so much of our commercially driven world and ever increasing in volume, it seems now is the time to address making them as efficient as possible.

All banks and financial institutions have a Digital Banking platform these days. But does yours just cover the basics? Or have you realised the fast-growing importance of this channel for your customers and your bank’s future?Increasingly, it’s the channel your existing customers choose to interact with you in. And as the digital native generation reaches adulthood and the workforce, it will be the only channel they’ll use – to research, apply and use their banking products and services.

It’s time to change your perspective – it’s no longer ‘digital banking’. It’s ‘banking in a digital world’. And to take your rightful place in this digital world, your Digital Banking strategy needs to tick all the boxes. Customers call the shots in the digital age. Their expectations are higher and they’re less willing to accept anything but the best. When it comes to digital banking, simply giving customers a way to transact and transfer isn’t going to cut it. Customers want to fully self-service and take control of their own financial management.