DIGITAL BANKING
How important are digital ecosystems for all parties involved ( banks , fintechs , consultancies ) today ? How has PSD2 helped drive an era of collaboration in financial services ?
Ben Hunter : PSD2 ultimately aims to help drive innovative banking services , specifically around payments and account information services .
Traditional and Digital banks have been developing open APIs in order to encourage third party solution ( such as fintechs ) to leverage the data made available .
Further to PSD2 , the new ISO20022 payments messaging standard changes have forced banks in particular to review their payments systems and make fundamental technology changes .
Either to change or develop new payments systems themselves or leverage third-party payment providers ( fintechs ) for orchestration , gateway and the like . What this has also done is presented an opportunity for organisations to look closely at their business and decide where to scale back or put the effort in .
In some cases we have seen organisations decide to invest heavily into expanding their business into new markets , or in some cases , defer large parts of their payment processing to a third-party outsource partner / solution to reduce overhead , management and risk .
We are more and more dependent upon technology . With a growing cashless society and the reduction of face-to-face services , the modern generation has high expectations in terms of quality of service in a digital era .
Beyond open banking , we expect to see this further expand into the likes of open pensions which is in the works , as well as innovation such as augmented reality ( AR ) where banks are already trialing technology to build a more visual virtual banking world .
Richard Butler : Digital ecosystems are interconnected networks of companies , often spanning different industries , that collaborate to create value for customers by combining their products , services , data , and technologies .
This means that digital ecosystems extend far broader than banks and fintechs , and include non-financial companies . For example , a bank could partner with a fintech for advanced data analytics , a retailer for loyalty programmes , and a telecom company
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