Retail Banking 2020 Research Outlook

2020 promises to be a year of excitement and challenge for retail bankers. Celent's analysts have a full agenda planned to help them address their strategic technology challenges. Clients can click through for more detail.

Retail Banking Research Outlook: 2020

THREE EXTERNAL FORCES DRIVING BANKING CHANGE

Retail bankers face a landscape shaped by three powerful external forces.

Banks and credit unions will continue to see new competitors try to pick off pieces of their business. From BigTech (Amazon, Google, Facebook, et. al.) to neo- and digital-only banks, incumbents will be facing competitive pressures from rivals trying to change the rules of the game. And smaller institutions, those who’ve typically only had to worry about local and regional financial competition, now must contend with Tier I banks entering their markets with brand and very good digital offerings.

Those digital offerings, funded by tens of millions of dollars of investment, have begun to appeal to customers who have been exposed to cutting edge experiences. The expectations that Uber, Amazon, Instagram, and Apple have all helped to shape trickle over into banking interactions. Fairly or not, people want their banking experiences to be contextual, engaging, and fast (regulations be damned!). Many banks now have at least serviceable digital offerings; the challenge is fortifying the middle- and back-offices to support them.

Banking executives uncertain about the economic environment have begun to act more cautiously. Speculative investments that may have been justified by the need to digitize or innovate are being scrutinized more closely, while finance is trying to figure out how to deal with new software development technologies like agile.

These forces imply a set of specific technology priorities that banks should embrace. We’re going to focus our research efforts on helping bankers (from line of business executives to technologists, strategists to implementers) educate themselves about key technological questions, prioritize their spending, and execute their strategies.

VendorMatch, Celent’s new vendor discovery tool, is playing an increasingly important role in our vendor analysis. See more at https://www.celent.com/vendormatch.

2020 RESEARCH THEMES

Five areas will dominate our retail banking research. While our space changes quickly enough that we’ll respond to fast moving new developments, analysts will be focusing on cloud, AI, data, payments, and, of course, our flagship Model Bank Awards (to be published in April).

Cloud

Entering adolescence, cloud implementations are becoming increasingly common. With experience, banks are uncovering unexpected sources of value and discovering new drawbacks that they’ll need to be wary of.

Artificial Intelligence

The promise of AI is coming into focus, and some of the more outlandish claims have been tempered. As it begins to enter its prime, we’ll explore AI’s adoption, use cases, and vendors.

Data

A huge topic, data is the greatest untapped source of value for banks. From strategy to tactics, we’ll explore the role and adoption of APIs in facilitating data flow, the part that external partners can play in monetizing data, and the pitfalls that banks should consider.

Payments

Real-time payments will continue to gain traction in 2020, but we can’t ignore cards, in both plastic and digital form factors, which continue to dominate retail payments. Payments is changing rapidly and will have a profound affect on banks’ relationships with their customers.

Model Bank Awards

We’ve just closed nominations and had almost 140 nominations of exceptionally high quality. We’ll be assessing them shortly and developing case studies of the winners, culminating in the mid-April publication of roughly two dozen reports from around the globe.

TOPIC AREAS

We show a high-level view of 2020’s outlook categorized by type of deliverable. Note that we’ll be publishing Briefing Notes (a new short format based on interesting updates we receive from industry players) throughout the year, but there’s no way to predict what those topics will be.

Industry Trends and Case Studies

• Model Bank case studies from around the world

• IT spending

• Cloud

• Data and APIs

• Payments (including card issuing platforms)

• Mortgage Banking

• Customer Communications Management

• Various Briefing Notes

Polls, panels, and primers

• Cloud adoption and lessons

• AI use cases (including RPA)

• State of digital transformation

• Consumer attitudes toward banking technology

• Payments priorities

ABCD reports (Our flagship vendor assessment)

• Digital Platforms

• Core (traditional and cloud)

• Loan Collection Systems

• Channel Systems

Contact us for more information about what we have planned in Q1.

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