Future of bank: a hybrid between a bank and an IT-company

Banking institutions are traditionally perceived as a monolith of tradition and conservatism. But the Internet and mass migration to smartphones/tablets has changed the rules of the game: not the tradition but the comfort of use is the most important. In the Ukrainian banking sector this resulted in active development of applications for Internet banking, where it has successfully stopped, leaving everything as it was before. But in the future things will be different: today, bank can not remain the way it was a hundred years ago. Forbes figured out what kind of future awaits banks and what does Big Data has to do with it.

Phone instead of a bank card

About six months ago, Apple launched the service Apple Pay. It allows you to turn your iPhone into a bank card and pay for purchases directly from your smartphone. The results were not long in coming: Chase Bank reported about 1 million cards added to iPhones; Bank of America and American Express filmed their advertisements for popularization of this  technology, and 2 out of 3 of contactless payments in the United States are performed through the Apple Pay. Today, Samsung, Google and several other companies are working on similar technologies.

The advantage of Apple Pay over a conventional bank card is its mobility: smartphone is always with you and there is no need to separately enter data when purchasing goods over the Internet. This saves time of people. In addition, a dozen cards from a variety of banks can be placed on one smartphone. There is no need for a big wallet or a card holder.

The difficulty is that in Ukraine there is virtually no necessary infrastructure for such a project. Today, it is a problem even for more "advanced" countries: even in the United States only 700,000 outlets are ready to accept payments via iPhone. In the future, this problem will be resolved by updating the terminals and cash registers.

The future of banks that can fit in your pocket

Tomasz Wisniewski, FUIB's Deputy Chairman of Board, about how the future of the banking system will look like.

There is much talk about the electronic future. One hear a lot about such things as e-government, e-money, e-commerce, etc. But of all the predictions about the future of the banking system, which today are provided by numerous analysts, the forecast about the disappearance of bank cards seems the most obvious and the most real one.

Most likely, the cards in the future will be substituted by smartphones. Already there are a lot of mobile applications that perform the function of a e-purse in the market. People in Europe are increasingly switching to this technology, which in the future could completely replace "plastic".

This trend affects not only the card, but the whole spectrum of banking operations, including cash settlements. For example, in Sweden a program of refusal of cash in the future is considered at the level of the National Bank. Although it seems unlikely to me that a complete rejection of cash is possible in the short term. Judge for yourself: such a rejections means a complete rejection of anonymity. So, in my opinion, the cash will stay, the only question is - for how long? I think, until the system of data protection reaches a level of development that can be trusted, not only by ordinary users, but also by large corporations and governments.

It must be admitted that the development of technologies rigidly dictates conditions of bank development. Here is an example: I am a customer of a bank in Poland, which has no branches at all (the bank is not represented in Ukraine). Although in general the countries of Eastern Europe, the Baltic states lag behind the West and the developed part of Asia in the field of advanced technologies.

We are used to and continue to work with documents in paper form, while the Western world actively switches to paperless communication with customers and partners. Ukraine is the land of paper and the conventional seal. We fear that without a paper document, we will not be able to prove anything.

Another example: I had a mortgage in Poland a few years ago. I needed the repayment history of my account. I printed it out fr om my Internet banking, and sent it to another bank, wh ere it was accepted without the seal. I think that the future of banking is in such an approach.

Banking will develop due to new customers who do not need the bank as a building - they need fast and high quality banking services. In fact, they need a bank that will always be available - a bank in the pocket, a bank that will fit into their smartphone.

Source: Forbes