The economic fallout from the coronavirus pandemic is being felt across all industry verticals, and banking is no different. Banks are waking up to a new normal. At one end, there are issues such as reduced fee income and lower loan demand. And at the other end, there is an increase in non-performing assets (NPA) in their current books of business due to deterioration in credit quality.
Bank are now turning to increased automation to help them weather this storm, and a few trends are emerging.
Emerging Trends in the Banking and Financial Services Industry
First, the current situation will further accelerate the migration of customers to digital channels. There will be a substantial drop in people returning to physical branches and Banks will need to re-evaluate their viability and move any investments they want to make to digital.
Second, the adoption of intelligent hyperautomation as a business transformation tool will see a massive increase in a post-coronavirus financial world. This will become an increasingly important asset and play a significant role in both ensuring that banks have the operational resilience needed in these uncertain times, and that they are able to acquire and service customers efficiently.
Traditionally, the focus of automation has been mostly in the back-office functions such as trade reconciliation, fund accounting etc. Moving forward, more and more front office processes from product discovery to prospecting to customer service will see benefits realized from automation.
Banks will need to adopt an agile, platform-based approach to streamline their automation initiatives. The ability to develop and roll-out Minimal Viable Products (MVPs) based on business requirements or in weeks rather than months will be key. Also, they will need to build on top of existing technology infrastructure to maximize the ROI. In order to achieve these objectives, Banks should look at deploying a low-code, no-code solution that also has end-to-end automation capabilities.