The Banking Industry Architecture Network (BIAN) is holding a meeting in Madrid these days to address the future of the banking sector, at a time when entities around the world are under pressure to tackle digital transformation.
Banking moving to digital
There is no doubt that banks are devoting a lot of resources and effort to evolve their business models towards digital, but they have a hard time keeping up with other native companies in the middle, such as fintech. And one of the main reasons is that traditional banking organizations are devoting between 60 and 80% of their technological budgets to maintaining their legacy infrastructures.
This is one of the conclusions that emerge from the round table that has taken place in open during the first of the days, in which have participated experts in technology of banks (Santander and the American PNC); of fintechs (MyTripleA and 2gether Bank), and technology providers (Epiphany and Sngular).
Agile methodologies and technologies
Those entities that do not evolve quickly may have problems in the future, and to move forward in that process they must move towards distributed models, agile methodologies and technologies that add value, far from centralized and monolithic environments. For the participants in the panel, deepening the digitalization will allow them to focus more on the client and accelerate the production of digital services, a question that today fintech companies are leading.
Other things about to be implemented
Regarding the technologies that are disruptive in the evolution of the sector, a good number of them were mentioned, such as, for example, microservices or cloud computing architectures, but there are probably two that have the greatest impact. On the one hand, big data, insofar as it can be combined with machine learning solutions, increases the predictive capacity of organizations in areas such as risk measurement. On the other, blockchain, which will facilitate the implementation of new business models.
Also, in the opinion of the representatives of these companies, the Open Banking with the opening of the data that entails, which in the European Union is regulated by the PSD2 regulation, will mean a new opportunity for income generation and for the consumer to access innovative banking services.
Collaborate to advance
During the first day, held yesterday, the BIAN, which de facto is a collaborative environment that ensures interoperability, security and compliance, also announced the latest developments around its common framework proposal, called API Exchange , a series of 89 standardized API definitions that aim to promote the adoption of new digital services much faster and that are already being used by a good part of the industry.
Also published on Medium.