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10 areas of financial services in dire need of innovation

ย  Any bank that calls itself a digital bank is bullshitting, according to ANZ chief technology officer Patrick Maes. Speaking at the Fintech Melbourne meetup last week, Maes says there are 10 problems facing the financial services industry that are in dire need of innovation. Only when these 10 problems are solved, can banks truly […]
Kye White
Kye White
10 areas of financial services in dire need of innovation

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Any bank that calls itself a digital bank is bullshitting, according to ANZ chief technology officer Patrick Maes.

Speaking at the Fintech Melbourne meetup last week, Maes says there are 10 problems facing the financial services industry that are in dire need of innovation. Only when these 10 problems are solved, can banks truly call themselves digital. Maes says these 10 problems have the potential to be very lucrative for fintech startups that solve them.

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1. Consumer payments

โ€œEspecially from a disruptive perspective. How can we add layers upon layers upon layers of convenience atop of something thatโ€™s still old fashioned, that still has a Visa or a MasterCard scheme.

โ€œLook at Apple Pay. Apple Pay is an absolute disaster. All theyโ€™re doing is building something on top of an existing scheme, and all theyโ€™re doing is making it more expensive by a few basis points.โ€

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2. Distributed ledgers

โ€œWhen I talk about distributed ledgers, itโ€™s not always in payments. I think thereโ€™s a lot of future in using this technology in the capital markets.

โ€œDerivatives confirmation. Where you use the blockchain as a transport mechanism, almost a little truck, and put something heavy on top of it, and you do the exchange with all the transparency the blockchain offers you.โ€

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2. End point security

โ€œOur customers are using mobile devices for payments, we donโ€™t only want to secure the little container where we are operating in our cosy little world. We want to secure our customers at the end point, ensuring their mobile device over there is secure. How do you do that?โ€

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3. Omni-channel

โ€œHow do you share information across multiple touch points? The customer has looked at loans on the internet, walks into the branch, and the branch officer knows youโ€™ve been looking at a loan. How do we share information in context?โ€

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4. Enhanced scoring

Banks already have access to a considerable amount of internal data that can be used to build a picture of the financial health of their customers and potential customers. But thereโ€™s a vast swathe of public data that isnโ€™t being tapped into.

โ€œHow can we use social media (for example) to enhancing our scoring,โ€ he says.

โ€œHow can we use public data to make our scoring more intelligent?โ€

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5. Helping individual customers across multiple providers

โ€œVery rarely do you have a customer thatโ€™s working with only financial services provider. So how do you do that across multiple providers?โ€

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6. Data analytics

โ€œThis is going to explode. And only very few companies will really take advantage of this extremely powerful science in the advantage of the customer. Thereโ€™s a global problem here because thereโ€™s a shortage of the people who have the real skills to do that.

โ€œWe havenโ€™t really seen a lot of compelling models.โ€

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7. Trade supply chain and financial platform management

โ€œA very important function of financial services and thereโ€™s very little innovation in that space. โ€

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8. Peer-to-peer lending

โ€œTo consumers, but I would say focus more on SMEs. Lending from businesses to SMEs.โ€

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10. Digital on-boarding

โ€œUsing electronic verification and so-on.โ€

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This article was originally published on StartupSmart.