Mobile banking was predicted to overtake high street branch visits within two years, way before the Covid struck our lives. The restrictions placed in our daily lives to get the hold of the pandemic proved to be acting as a catalyst in fastening the adoption and recovery. Even though they discovered unnecessary visits the banks have not had to close during the UK lockdown. Many people new to online banking discovered that it could provide a quick and easy and COVID-safe way to manage their finances. And as summer came to an end, over three-quarters of the UK population were using some form of online banking and one in ten people had switched to a digital-only bank. When it is implemented well, online, digital and app-based banking is as easy as shopping with Amazon, booking a cab on Uber or grabbing a takeaway via Deliveroo. With the potential to create this amazing customer experience to losing everything if it fails banks are under a lot of pressure to deliver the digital services. But their success (or otherwise) will depend on how well they manage their digital data and, in particular, how willing they are to adopt more agile, scalable, cloud-based solutions to underpin their new services.
It is not a doubt that the UK’s financial sector is extremely slow when it comes to adopting new techniques or technologies. Still many firms in UK rely on mainframes. But this is due to the cautions taken from being the victims of the continued rise in cybercrime and the fear of non-compliance with FCA data projection regulations. They do not want to embrace new techs which will help them scale and support customer demand for digital services. And this can be done, if they are willing to, with an IT infrastructure that keeps out cyber criminals, hackers and anyone else without explicit authorization to view that data. And in that case- Their legacy IT systems are secure and protect customer data from cybercriminals, banks do not want to risk implementing new solutions that could leave them exposed even if those old systems make them less nimble and less responsive to changing customer demands. The increased digitalization across the sector leaves banks facing a second security and data management challenge. Now Open Banking, a UK government backed program that encourages banks to securely share their data with trusted third-party financial services providers via an API (Application Programming Interface). These third-party providers offer apps to assist with utility bill management, accounting and auditing, and savings (usually rounding up apps). Once a user grants authorization, the app directly interfaces with that user’s current account. But for the banks it means reassessment of security and data management strategies. Automating data management components can improve security and cut costs by reducing human contact. In addition, it enables faster and more accurate data management that can accelerate cloud adoption where data management is key to success. But at this point that banks have been slow on the uptake of both public and private cloud technology, and are clearly still concerned about security and privacy threats. This is despite the fact that cloud computing particularly with a zero-trust approach to security that has become a lot safer and carries far less risk. But the change is happening, larger banks have started to recognize that cloud computing holds the key to running an agile business allowing them to scale their online services and safely store, process and mine vast amounts of digital customer data. Therefore 2021 should be the year that most banks and financial organizations embrace and invest in new technology when it comes to data management.
