Banks Must Embrace Customer-Centric Reinvention Today

Traditional banking models rely on predictability, stability and passive customers. The problem for financial services is this model is no longer relevant. So, what now?

Banking is challenged like never before. Disruptive entrants and huge tech firms are moving into the market, threatening years of hegemony. The reason they’re doing this is simple – the customers are no longer passive. They demand change.

Digitization has shifted customers from an inert, loyal position to one where they demand value-added services, ease of use, accessibility and greater control.

Today, 99% of Gen Z and 98% of Millennials use apps for budgeting, tracking and viewing monthly spend forecasts. The ways in which people can now engage with financial services is staggering – apps, QR payments, WhatsApp assistants and digital payment providers like Adyen or Mollie represent the thin end of the wedge.

Consumer expectation has been set by high-quality digital services elsewhere and now they want the same in banking. If banks can’t provide this, disruptors in the industry will meet the need. The time to act is now.

“To remain relevant, banks need to understand and embrace how customers are feeling and acting,” says Accenture.

Improving operational efficiency and mitigating risk are critical to banking’s core drive of delivering greater customer-centricity. Yet, this can only be achieved with a modernized, end-to-end tech stack providing the easy scalability needed to innovate.

Exploiting new profit pools like Banking as a Service (BaaS) and building platform banking will require each organization to process terabytes of data, conduct better behavioral analysis and embed agile development processes to become responsive to emerging trends.

As a leader in intelligent edge computing solutions, SUSE is perfectly placed to help eliminate complexity with solutions to orchestrate and deploy seamlessly across multi-cluster, multi-cloud and hybrid environments.

With these new capabilities in place, banking organizations can scale rapidly without cost or licensing fees, experiment freely, foster collaboration and embed automation to help develop new customer-centric services.

That’s already a lot of value gains but perhaps more critically, this can all be achieved with security ‘baked in’ as a continuous process. SUSE can help financial organizations to centralize authentication processes, provide role-based access control and use CIS benchmarking for automatic life-cycle security in mission-critical environments.

These security enhancements can improve day-to-day operations by helping you offer greater system stability and enable a better quality service for customers.

SUSE offers the most adaptable Linux operating system and the only open Kubernetes management platform. Together with our edge solutions, you can transform according to your own priorities and in any environment – multi-cloud, on-prem or hybrid cloud.

Learn more about our banking and financial services solutions here.

If you would like to talk to one of our experts or discover how SUSE can enable the right kind of digital transformation for long-term success, please get in touch.