Whitepapers

Europe is currently in the grips of a cost of living crisis, with millions of beleaguered households on the continent in desperate need of help as spiralling inflation and rising prices play havoc on their finances. The findings expose the level of impact Europeans expect the cost of living crisis to have on their finances. In response, people across these markets told us they plan to take drastic action to rein in their spending, as well as turning to a range of third parties for financial support. Among those they would most likely turn to are their banks and other financial providers.

The Digital Banking context is changing. New players are entering the financial services arena and threatening the position of incumbents. Customer habits have deeply changed over the last year as new technologies are appearing to enable frictionless communication, and banks have immensely increased the amount of data they handle. Harvesting the full potential of these data will be a game changer for financ ial players, as it will unlock new opportunities to engage the customers and deliver concrete outcomes. The benefits of fully-exploited data include extending th e customer base, better profiling (e.g., credit scoring), as well as creating new revenue streams.

SMEs, and in particular micro and small companies, are an important part of the European economy. The micro and small business segment includes over 25 million companies, with a total turnover of over €10bn, and employs just under 43% of the total number of employees in the European private sector. Despite the overall size of the segment, these companies have been, up to now, challenging for banks to serve. Due to the small size of these organizations, they are often classified and treated as retail customers. This, coupled with their limited accounting and financial management capabilities, limits their ability to access finance.

Financial services is a data-intensive industry in which banks and insurance companies have historically held large quantities of information. The development of the internet, the increase in new channels, and the introduction of technologies including cookies and trackers have helped not only to create a better user experience, but also to exponentially increase the amount of collected data, for the most part dark data. With the availability of new digital technologies and a higher degree of interconnectivity and interactions, new data sources have emerged that are a potential treasure trove for businesses.

Currently, we live in an era where personalization has become the norm and is expected from banks, as financial services are increasingly driven by highly customized and personalized offerings from not only traditional banks, but also neo banks, FinTech’s, digital financial providers, and even companies outside of financial services such as telcos and retail companies. These opportunities are enabled by technologies, analytic capabilities and endless user information that allow providers to create such personalized experiences that customers love.

The beginning of Open Banking had a variety of industry and commercial impacts, but one of the unintended consequences in consumers’ lives was that they came to realize that their data was theirs and that they could choose who to share it with. That was catalyzed by all the campaign of awareness about the social networks scandals raised on the past, where people started to wake about what other companies where doing with their information and how their were leveraging their business models on all the metadata and insights information behind liking a photo on Instagram, reacting to a publication on Facebook or checking into a place in Foursquare. As a result, in the future, people are going to be more cautious about their personal information and their data, but they will still share it with you if you prove to them that your counterpart is worth the cost.