Everything about digitization in the financial industry

Robo-Advisors vs. Traditional Customer Advisors

My last post before the Christmas break was about which business models and strategies a robo-advisor can align its offering with. Today, I will present the customer advisory processes of traditional, human banking advisory services and robo-advisors. In the rest of the series, I will then discuss the impact caused by robo-advisors which form of advisory is better and whether robo-advisors will be able to replace bank advisors in the near future.

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What Is a Robo-Advisor and Why Should We Care?

In the course of the change from a personalized customer experience at a bank to the desire for standardized and digitized processes, “robo-advisors” are becoming increasingly important. Today’s article looks at how robo advisory services are defined and how they came into being, whether they are serious competition for banks, and what stage of development robo-advisors are at now.

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Agile Corporate Culture – What’ s It All About? (Part 2)

The culture of a company is the beliefs, values and behaviors that shape the social and psychological environment of the organization. As a 2017 Capgemini change management study shows, the companies that transform most successfully are also those that involve their employees in the transformation process from start to finish and thus actively promote a change in corporate culture. Many studies from science and practice also make it clear that the path to an agile culture is not an easy one. In a recent article, the consulting firm McKinsey has published four lessons learned from its experience with clients around the world that offer a good approach to how companies can foster the development of an agile culture.

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Augmented Reality in Education and the Financial Sector

The current corona virus situation has shown us that we are capable of taking big steps in digitalization in a very short time in the education sector. Digital methods have already found their way into schools and universities, but this sometimes hesitant development was reinforced to an unprecedented degree by the homeschooling required during the peak of the pandemic. Collaborative platforms have grown enormously, and new teaching and learning formats have been introduced in the form of explanatory videos and virtual lessons or group work. One technology, or rather a concept that has been largely ignored so far, but which offers great potential for improving both digital and face-to-face teaching, is augmented reality (AR), the enrichment of reality with virtual content.

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Open Banking Summit 2020 – Opportunities and Implementation Scenarios for Open Banking in Switzerland

Recently, the Swiss Bankers Association published an overview that outlines the status of open banking in Switzerland and formulates requirements for its further development of open banking. These requirements include the clear strategic positioning of Swiss banks and the joint development of standardized APIs for data exchange between financial institutions and third-party providers. The aim of this overview is to “support the dialogue in the financial center”, as Richard Hess writes in the initial contribution to the blog parade of the Swiss Bankers Association. The Open Banking Summit of the standardization initiative OpenBankingProject.ch pursued the same goal on September 10th, with various presentations focusing on these two requirements.

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Effects of the Coronavirus Pandemic on the Financial Industry

Since the beginning of 2020, the coronavirus pandemic has caused an enormous slump in the global economy due to lockdowns all over the world. The IMF expects global GDP to decline by 5%, and for the euro zone it is likely to be as much as 10.2% [1] – and these are the figures before a possible second wave. It remains to be seen how the economy will recover. What can already be well assessed, on the other hand, are the qualitative effects of the pandemic on the macro trends relevant to the financial industry.

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The Convergence of Distributed Ledger Technology and Artificial Intelligence Exemplified by the Lending Process (Part 3)

In the first two contributions to this three-part series, we have shown that the simultaneous use of distributed ledger technology and artificial intelligence can improve today’s lending process in many ways. However, the lending process is only one of many processes that can potentially benefit from the merging of DLT and AI. In the following we have compiled the process characteristics that indicate that a process leads to the convergence of the two technologies and can therefore be optimized by them.

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The Convergence of Distributed Ledger Technology and Artificial Intelligence Exemplified by the Lending Process (Part 2)

Technological convergence means that two or more technologies merge into a single system that is more powerful than each of the technologies individually. Since AI and DLT are technologies that have some opposing characteristics (e.g., centrality vs. decentralization; transparency vs. black box), the two technologies complement each other and can compensate for crucial weaknesses of the other. Since the lending process is one of the main processes in the banking business and involves both communication and data analysis (AI) and the transmission of sensitive data (DLT), it is ideally suited for a practical examination of both the prerequisites and the effects of technological convergence.

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The Convergence of Distributed Ledger Technology and Artificial Intelligence Exemplified by the Lending Process (Part 1)

The distributed ledger technology (DLT) and artificial intelligence (AI) are two promising technologies that are at the top of their hype cycle. Scientists assume that the convergence of the blockchain, the Internet of Things (IoT) and artificial intelligence offers considerable opportunities, such as accelerating the pace of service, process and business model innovations. However, the information available in the current literature and research on how such an integration could be implemented in practice is still sparse. Over the next week, this series of articles will explore how specific elements of DLT and AI can be combined to achieve potential technological convergence, and what significance this convergence has for the lending process.

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Technostress – The Dark Side of the Increasing Use of Information and Communication Technologies

The economy and society in general have benefited greatly from increasing digitization and access to ICT. However, this development also has its downsides. In recent years, both scientific studies and practical reports have increasingly pointed out that the use of ICT in both private and organizational contexts can lead to strong stress perceptions among the respective users. This specific form of stress is called technostress. This blog post explains the causes and effects of technostress and suggests measures companies can take to minimize technostress for their employees.

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Strategic Leadership in the Context of Digital Transformation (Part 2)

Our modern world, increasingly accelerated by innovative technologies, demands constant adaptation from companies. Digital transformation is now omnipresent. Now, every transformation also means business model innovation. This innovation can either be developed internally or integrated into the company through external acquisitions. Which of these options is selected depends, on the one hand, on the expertise available within the company and, on the other hand, on the prevailing management system, i.e. on the type of guidelines by which the board of directors sets targets for top management and against which it evaluates its performance. There are basically two options available to the board of directors: strategic or financial control. In this article, we will look at the advantages and disadvantages of these two management systems and which of them is better suited to sustainable innovation and transformation, the prerequisites for long-term success in business today.

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Strategic Leadership in the Context of Digital Transformation (Part 1)

While in the past it was sufficient to improve a well-functioning business model through incremental innovation in an attempt to preserve its competitive advantage over the long term, an ever-changing environment with technological innovations and changing customer needs and expectations requires companies to constantly transform themselves and explore new business areas. For this reason, transformation in the context of digitalization is one of the major research topics at the CC Ecosystems. While we at the Competence Center focus primarily on transformation methods and capabilities, in this two-part series, I would like to focus on transformation governance, in particular the role of the board of directors and executive management in initiating and implementing a transformation. Part 1 focuses on the environmental changes that make a transformation necessary and outlines the measures to be introduced by the board of directors.

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Structuring Open Business Capabilities – A Structuring Approach for API Initiatives

APIs represent an important component of the digital transformation towards networked business models. This inevitably raises questions: Do I start by providing an API developer portal or an overall strategy? Which infrastructure components should be used and to what extent should I provide central guidelines? How can I prioritize possible activities? The “API House of Digital Business” provides assistance in answering these questions.

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Reflections on the Future of Swiss Banking

The financial sector is currently facing one of its biggest challenges with the Corona pandemic: A collapse in economic growth, high unemployment, credit defaults and volatile stock markets. Furthermore, the old problems such as pressure on margins, increasingly intense competition, the shift of the customer interface towards innovative fintechs and the ubiquitous digitalization have not yet been solved. These developments challenge traditional business models of local banks, but also offer opportunities for those who are willing to change or reinvent themselves.

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Are we heading for a happy society?

In a few years’ time, new or further developed sensors in smartwatches will not only record the wearer’s movements, but also their heart rhythm and breathing as well as their stress levels via measuring their skin surface tension. Around the world, thousands of developers are working on the new possibilities, hundreds of investors are evaluating the economic potential, and millions of consumers are waiting for the new gadgets. Will intelligent machines such as smartwatches with such capabilities bring us one step closer to a happy society?

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