Bruno Armindo Esteves Macedo

Innovation in Banking and Fintech is something amazing to embrace these days. Consumers around the world have changed the way they discover products, the way they buy and how they experience the products and services thanks to the Big Tech companies, their new technologies, innovative business models and disruptive brands. The general-purpose technologies behind the Fintech revolution have followed these trends and proved their value. Financial disruption has drastically altered societies, pre-existing economic and social structures. As for Banks & Financial Institutions (BFIs), to adapt to the Fintech revolution and the age of Open-Banking, artificial intelligence, machine learning, cognitive learning and other disruptive GPTs is a challenging task. They need not only to adapt to current times, but also to strive for leadership through innovation to match these new consumers, which makes it even harder to keep up.

Understanding and adapting to this new type of consumer connection is crucial and to be able to keep up with it (BFIs) need a shift to a phygital approach. They need to connect their online and offline worlds in a way that will allow them to create closer, more efficient, and more human customer experiences. A phygital approach is a new type of corporate innovation strategy that can pull (BFIs) industry legacy experience strengths but still be able to perceive and address their new market resulting “weaknesses” by:

• Exploring means to understand and adapt to the driving forces behind the ongoing banking digital transition;
• Being on the lookout for new global good practices in the development of new financial products under -digital channels and trough digital product development;
• Realizing the strategic importance of the “new consumers” (Millennials. Gen X. Gen Z. Baby Boomers) and adapt to serve them;
• Exploring means to understand and structurally be able to respond to a new generation of fast and constant changes in regulation ;
• Achieving a genuinely phygital experience by using the existing GPTs into facilitating the introduction of immediacy (ensuring things happen at an exact moment in time), immersion (the user is part of the experience) and not forgetting as stated in previous posts a constant cognitive interaction that binds the buying experience with the customer.

BFI’s have also to take into account that this massive revolution has brought and keeps bringing new players into the market like Neo Banks, FinTech Startups, TechFin Giants (GAFA), Mobile Network Operators. All of them have strong arguments to compete and disrupt. Therefore BFI’s need to find partners that can orchestrate their business strategy to not only take a digital leap that can bring them into a phygital version of themselves, but also to support them into thriving through continuous innovation and reinvention of their financial services. This version will then take the best components from the digital retail experience like immediacy, immersion, and speed and the chance to interact with people, the product and adapt those learnings to revolutionize also their brick-and-mortar experience.

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