Digitalization and automation in the Financial Services Industry – Tuning the Engine in Mid-Race

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Bart Van den Daele, GM, GTS, IBM Europe

New entrants, new habits among consumers combined with changing economies and regulatory environments, are transforming banking services at the speed of light with disruptive business models.

Consider that today banks face the following challenges:

• Less and less people do their banking in branches. Instead they are using their mobiles – to pay, to trade, to do almost everything. Banks need to be innovative enough to charm their clients – of today and tomorrow – without having a branch on every street corner.

• Regulators and customers expect banks to be always online

• Banks need to optimize cost structures and reduce cost – without outage, without disturbance, without interruption of service and with a bullet proof security.

Heavily dependent on technology, in 2017 banks and financial services organizations in Europe are expected to spend approximately EUR 90 billion on IT with a growing proportion of this to be invested in new technologies such as analytics, mobile and cloud. (Source: IDC*)

Clearly, the rules have changed and digitalization is at the heart of this process. It’s the cause and the result of the disruption. It’s also a whole new opportunity for the financial industry in Europe.

We see how European banks are reacting to these challenges leveraging mobility, security, resiliency, and cloud technologies in order to:

• transform from traditional branch structures towards digital channels;

• embrace the API economy without compromising their legacy systems;

• focus on an end-to-end cost reduction to be ready for anything the future holds for them

• keeping on top of technology trends going forward to anticipate the next big shifts in clients’ behavior.

How to tap into these new opportunities? 
IBM helps banks and financial institutions design and deliver transformational digital services and automate processes using its enterprise grade cloud and unique cognitive offerings through IBM Watson. More and more clients rely on IBM to be their services integrator – that is to manage the services and underlying infrastructure in an integrated and unified way through the cloud. To date more than 650 clients have deployed advanced automation capabilities from IBM Services with another 200 organizations expected to join them by the end of the year.

*. – IDC: Worldwide IT Spending 2015–2020 — Worldwide Banking IT Spending Guide, CY 2Q17. May 2017 | Doc #US40831717

*This article has first appeared on SeeNews on June 12.