New stimuli for banking evolution from Fintechs

The ‘FINTECH@speed: the Winning Growth engine’ conference, organized by CRIF and held in Rome on Friday July 5, was an opportunity to share experiences and insights on the development of the competitive context and on the outlook for the banking and financial industry in view of the significant impacts from new paradigms linked to open banking on the one hand, and from the increasingly important central role played by the end consumer on the other, facilitated in part by process digitalization, which improves involvement and the user experience.

Digital transformation and disruptive innovation are now absolutely central to credit institutions as well as to operators in the sector, increasingly moving towards new business models and the development of products and services able to better meet the needs of their customers, who are now used to ‘anytime, anywhere’ service levels from leading online players.

Within this scenario, the process of innovation and change is continuing to accelerate on a global scale, with the United States and the Far East representing the areas where experimentation is now stronger and more disruptive.

As well as looking at the overall framework of the context and sharing the most significant current trends, the conference was also an opportunity to present the practical experience of digital transformation within an international bank, BBVA, with significant impacts not only on technology, but also on the business model and internal organization.

The discussions continued thanks to the interesting input from an audience of participants coming from 15 different countries, who discussed the real opportunities that digital innovation can practically offer in a financial context to improve business processes and services intended for increasingly demanding customers.  

A topic that attracted particular attention was the role of Fintech companies, which are contributing to the further acceleration of the processes of change currently underway. Specifically, attention was paid to the shift from an initial attitude of distrust, if not exclusion, of new players, to the gradual awareness of the fundamental role they can play, with greater openness to other forms of partnership and inclusion, in preparation for the development of new ecosystems destined to replace, in a very short period of time, traditional models.