Customer expectations are changing tremendously, and the financial sector is obliged to react to this change. In the past few years, a lot of trends have been observed in the market, especially coming from the big card players who are deploying the multi-rail strategy, which is enhancing the services with instant payments and the usage of data to build new products and services. The European Payments Initiative (EPI) is whereby the European banks wish to end US dominance in payments by setting the directions for how they would like to utilize instant payments and real-time payment processing in order to offer something useful to the customer.
In this new digital era, where everything is faster online, banks must pay special attention to real-time compliance and fraud detection, resulting in an increase in 24/7 service, payment resilience, and scalability. In the past years, customers accepted a delay of 3 to 4 days for transactions to be processed, but it is no longer the same. Customers nowadays demand instant and quick payment irrespective of the day and time, showing a move towards a cashless economy. The most important thing is to have a customer-centric approach, and emerging topics like robotization, lean, and digital skills are required to keep up with the banking trend.
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Nevertheless, it is challenging to meet customer expectations while employing the latest technology in order to be the best in the market and to provide the best services for customers, but the banking industry is also facing some regulatory challenges. The finance sector is well aware that in front of them is the big SWIFT ISO20022 migration along with the newly built EU Retail Investment Strategy, which pushes the market towards instant, standardization, and cross-border interoperability. On the other hand, the debate about the fear of data and digitalization is the main driver for cost optimization as well as customer experience improvement.