Banks need to adapt to millennials: Experts

Manama : Retail banking industry needs to start making more changes to appeal to its millennial customers and to avoid fintech companies eating into its market share, financial experts opined yesterday.

Fintech companies are encroaching the market share of traditional banks, and the only way for banks to stay in the race is to adopt financial technologies, experts said.

Changing customer demographics have largely contributed to the need for banks to adapt, said CEO of NEC Payments Andrew Sims.

“There is a huge amount of changes going on in the industry currently. That’s largely brought about by customer demographics and customer behaviour not necessarily because of the banks wanting to change. The impact that millenials are having on society as a whole is huge, they are incredibly technology savvy, they prioritize mobile services. That currently isn’t what is being provided for by banks. This brings opportunities for companies like us to develop and provide agile and nimble digital banking solutions to service that sector,” he said.

“Changes in society is bringing in the need for banks to respond. If they dont, they will get left behind and fintech companies will take market share. Banks can work with fintech companies to provide the services the customers are asking for,” he said.

Sharing a similar view Murthy Ranjit, Banking Pre-sales Head, MEA, at Oracle Financial Services said that banks need to partner with fintech companies.

“The concerns for banks is now that fintech companies are eating into the banks’ market share. The solution for this is not to compete with fintech, rather they should collaborate with fitechs. They can do this by offering their customers state-of-the-art banking solutions which has a complete API factory, it boils down to the point of open banking, so fitech companies can also work with them and jointly they can provide opportunity for customers. In Europe it is happening rapidly, banks are working closely with fintech companies, the same can be said about certain countries in Asia like Singapore. However, in this region we are not seen much changes, but it is slowly picking up,” he said.