IBS Intelligence Podcasts

Covid-19 has created the prime opportunity for banks to adjust their strategy. But not through continued job cuts as they are not sustainable in the long term as experienced employees are needed to help steer out of the current situation. As European banks, in particular, continue to lose market share to their Wall Street rivals, Vikas Srivastava at Integral explains to Sunniva Kolostyak at IBS Intelligence why he believes that banks should first and foremost evaluate their technology strategy.

How do you turn a crisis into an opportunity? Suntec CEO Nanda Kumar offers his views on how banks can take the impact of the Coronavirus pandemic and turn it into an opportunity to reinforce customer trust and value, reducing the risks to their business. While taking a back-to-basics approach to customer-centricity, he also advocates a low-risk approach to digitisation without the need to replace functionally stable legacy core systems.

The iconic IBSI Sales League Table is back, and bigger than ever! In this interview, V Ramkumar, Senior Partner, Cedar Management Consulting International, explains the importance of the IBSI Sales League Table, how it is compiled and curated, the insights it provides on evolution and state of the banking technology industry, and the perspective it offers on activity levels in different global markets.

A Temenos survey has found that over three quarters of bankers believe that AI will be the technology to separate ‘winners’ from ‘losers’ over the next five years. Sunniva Kolostyak, reporter at IBS Intelligence, speaks to Mark Gunning, Global Business Solutions Director at Temenos, about the report ‘Forging new frontiers: advanced technologies will revolutionize banking’.

How do you create a bank for a group of people that constantly work and travel across borders, and how do you service them when mobility halts? Reporter Sunniva Kolostyak speaks to Guy Kashtan from Rewire, a digital banking service for migrants and international workers, about growth, serving a target audience, and social responsibility during COVID-19.

Is the neobank market overcrowded? How will the challenger banks cope in the era of Covid-19? What will be the focus of the next wave of neobanks coming to the banking market? Global Processing Services (GPS) is the payments technology provider powering several of the players in the first neobank cohort, including the likes of Revolut, Starling Bank and Curve. GPS CEO Joanne Dewar offers her perspective on challenging times for the challengers.

Cybersecurity specialist VMware Carbon Black has published its latest annual Modern Bank Heists. The report shows that 80% of surveyed financial institutions reported an increase in cyberattacks over the past 12 months, a 13% increase over 2019. How can financial institutions better protect themselves in the current cybersecurity landscape? And was it inevitable that during the Covid-19 pandemic, between February and April 2020, cyberattacks against the financial sector increased by 238%!

The UK Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) has expressed concern that the current Covid-19 crisis will affect the financial strength of payment service providers (PSPs) and consumers’ ability to access cash and payment services. Given the FCA’s renewed focus on the payments sector, PSPs should proactively review and, where necessary, update their compliance policies and procedures, particularly in relation to financial crime. PSPs should also assess their governance and risk management arrangements and ensure these are appropriate for their business models in the current economic climate.

Capgemini and Efma’s latest World Insurance Report 2020 reveals that consumers of all ages are adopting a “millennial mindset”, and increasingly trusting their own research to source information and purchase insurance products themselves. The report recommends that to remain relevant to customers, insurers need to better connect with their policyholders by providing them with hyper-personalised and experience-led engagement. Simply put, insurers need to offer the right products, at the right time and via the right channels.

US FinTech Securrency successfully raised $17.65 million in its Series A round earlier this year, led by strategic investor WisdomTree investments. Securrency is a pioneer of blockchain-based financial markets infrastructure technology centred on its identity and compliance framework to support global digital securities transactions. Now, the FinTech has partnered with Saudi investment management and banking firm, Musharaka Capital, to develop a compliant platform for issuing digital securities in Saudi Arabia.