The pandemic taught us to be ‘future-ready’, fast tracking the wave of tech intensity with years of transformation taking place in just months’ time across various sectors and industries.

The year 2020 has been filled with unforeseen turns and crises that got us on our feet, changing the way we live and imposing a ‘new-normal’ upon us. On the other hand, the pandemic taught us to be ‘future-ready’, fast tracking the wave of tech intensity with years of transformation taking place in just months’ time across various sectors and industries. The urgency for this transformation was filled with hurdles in the initial phases of the global lockdown. However, technology and innovation have been the key drivers ensuring the same level of efficiency as well as safety and convenience while operating remotely.  

Through the years of digital innovation and disruption, we have now entered an era of deeply connected, data-rich technologies that are changing how we live and work, and transforming economies around the world. Here is an overview of how organizations, especially in the financial services and banking sector, are expected to leverage the power of technology in the coming year and ensure a seamless experience for their customers.

Tech evolution in financial services during the pandemic 

Data is central for fortifying financial inclusion policy. Most financial services companies understand the need for data-based insights to deliver superior customer experiences. A usual scenario offers a variety of tools and platforms which are either too complicated or lack sufficient training with siloed data all over the place. Hence, causing a setback for the organizations to truly achieve their digital transformation capabilities. By adopting a unified technology platform, organizations will have an improved approach for automating business processes using data analytics and therefore, transforming the financial services industry with end-to-end automation at a lower cost. 

In addition to data analytics, it is also expected that blockchain adoption will accelerate in the post-pandemic era with the emergence of new business-transformative blockchain-based solutions. The financial services industry in this regard will continue to remain a strong area for blockchain interest, with particular interest in central bank digital currencies (CBDCs), largely driven by the pandemic. 

Ensuring that safety of customers’ data

When embracing new technologies especially cloud offerings, security remains a prime concern. Cloud offers the latest in security and is more secure than on premise servers if implemented correctly. Financial services have relied on their control and compliance-based security for years. Cloud providers are also looking to provision industry-specific security and regulatory measures like end-to-end data encryption to make it easier for financial services organizations to be compliant whilst migrating to cloud.

Embracing the combined power of Cloud and Data Analytics

It’s important to note that both Data Analytics and Cloud Computing play a huge role in the digital adoption journey of financial services organizations. Organizations are offering integrated platforms that are linking the benefits of these two technologies and allowing businesses to utilize data from anywhere and at any point of time and derive meaningful insights which is enabling them to enhance their customer experience without compromising the security of their critical data. For example, if the data is in a non-standard format, artificial intelligence from the Cloud Computing provider may be used in addition to machine learning to standardize the data. From there, the data can be harnessed through the Cloud Computing platform and utilized in a variety of ways. It can be searched, edited, and used for future insights.

The financial services industry has not been far behind. It has been a major user of cloud-based Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) for its non-core applications. Functions such as customer management, human capital management, and financial accounting have been moved progressively to cloud. 

The shift to cloud and data technologies is in highest gear

In 2020, digital acceleration went into overdrive as the global pandemic pushed us faster, and further, into the Data Age. In a world of digital interconnectedness, new possibilities emerge, and cloud, AI, ML will lead the way. According to Gartner, public cloud services will be essential for 90% of data and analytics innovation by 2022; cloud-based AI will increase 5x between 2019 and 2023, making AI one of the top workload categories in the cloud. This trend started well before the pandemic, but COVID-19's impact on the enterprise has certainly accelerated it. Moreover, the forward-looking data trends will create financial inclusion by optimizing costs, driving user enablement and maximizing the value from data.

With advances in digital technology, one thing has been quite eminent for business leaders — data analytics is the key to a successful digital transformation and ultimately strengthens customer understanding and engagement. It’s a challenging environment, but technologies like Big Data, Cloud and SaaS are there to help them make a huge difference.