Some key insights from the MEA Banking Technology Summit and Awards in Dubai, hosted by MEA Finance Magazine. I represented Comviva on the panel and had the privilege to interact with industry leaders. #MEA #Banking #Technology #Summit #Finance #Comviva
🏛 Branches are not dying. Not at least with the speed it was predicted. US Banks had a net addition of branches in 2023. Thousands of miles apart, Indian private banks as well as in many other geos showed similar trends. Trust remains one of the key reasons for choosing a banking relationship, and branches do play a part in amplifying that trust.
📱 Fintechs, E-commerce, Consumer Internet players have raised the bar on customer expectations from their banks. We discussed this topic at length with some brilliant insights from my esteemed panel members from Backbase, Mashreq, First Abu Dhabi Bank, Ajman Bank, and Al Maryah Community Bank. This famous saying – banking is important, banks are not, is also being challenged, with over 5 million customers choosing to close their bank accounts in East Africa, preferring fintech/digital wallets over bank accounts. So, they continue to transact digitally, yet without a bank account. I opined banks need to find a way to be ubiquitous in a customer’s life, without necessarily being in forefront.
Ecosystem And Partnerships – There is broad acceptance of the fact that the customer battle cannot be won alone. I observed increasing acceptance of co-existence of different ecosystem players, as opposed to historical view where banks had scepticism about FinTech’s eating into their pie, and vice versa. The view I shared on my panel was – when it comes to banking, customers are looking for two core aspects trust and convenience. And to offer that convenience, banks have to broaden their ecosystem. Incidentally there were some partnerships announced on sidelines of the event. One of them being, Finali Fernano of HSBC announcing their partnership on card acquiring in UAE.
🧠 GenAI – Like any conference globally, GenAI was a hot topic here too. Generally speaking – there is cautious optimism about GenAI. While on one side the potential seems huge in terms of productivity, efficiency, speed to market, however on the other side there are some equally troubling questions.
- Do you unleash GenAI for direct customer interactions?
- What about frauds, deep fake?
- How to ensure responsible GenAI usage?
- What role regulators would play, if at all any role.
The broader consensus seems to be:
- GenAI is definitely a game-changer.
- While it will certainly make some jobs redundant, but as is the case with most innovations, it is also going to open up new roles. Re-skilling workforces for a GenAI world will be a top priority in coming times.
- In next 18-24 months, the production usage priority would be more on internal/back-office use-cases (underwriting, KYC & Due Diligence, Internal and external reporting); while usage in customer facing use-cases will pick up gradually in assistive, advisory roles (perhaps as digital assistance to the front office staff like relationship managers).
Super Apps – The jury was out on this one. Some interesting conversations on whether super-apps are growing, their adoption in the region, broader strategy around Super-apps. From the conversations I had, my take aways was – except for parts of Asia Pacific, super-apps, and particularly horizontal super-apps have had limited success. Vertical super-apps (in banking/finance parlance – financial super-apps) definitely have higher uptake. The house was fairly divided on how this space will evolve. My personal view is – I don’t see adoption of horizontal super-apps at a global scale. This adoption requires lot of behavioural change, and I feel it would be at best be a regional phenomenon. Financial super-apps though will definitely grow in adoption across, with investments, borrowing, financial advisory, routine financial transactions being the core theme of such super-apps.
