The race to remain relevant within the financial services sector has ramped up in the last few years, and innovation within banks is pushing past simply digitised forms of current services. But in the wake of Covid-19, how have banking customer needs changed and what support do they need right now?

Mel Palmer, CMO at Nucoro and Nikolai Hack, COO, were joined by Chris Crespo, Former Digital Strategist at Nordea for an engaging discussion evaluating the landscape of current customer expectations and how this has been affected by COVID-19.  Re-watch the discussion with the panel where they cover:

- The impact of Covid-19 on customer needs within banking

- What actually is ‘innovation’ in banking?

- Practical advice to get innovation off the ground

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Banks are competing against numerous external forces, not merely other banks. Rising customer expectations fuelled by increased use of intuitive and personal digital services in other services means there is added pressure on traditional banks to match the customer-first digital services that consumers are used to. However, banks' legacy infrastructure and often, less agile culture, means it is much harder for them to pivot and attempt to catch up with newer organisations.

Banks have three options when approaching this challenge:

1. Stay as they are
   Banks could do nothing, remain in the state that they currently operate in and continue to watch as revenue dwindles and customer numbers fall.
2. Buy or build
   Banks' large workforces mean that they could build their own solution in-house, or buy off-the-shelf technology and implement it themselves. Both sounds proactive and positive options on the face of it but looking at the results of those who have chosen either path, it is an uphill struggle full of misplaced, and eventually wasted, resource and budget. Often by the time the solution gets off the ground, the technology is outdated or mismatched with the latest customer needs.
3. Partner
   Partnering enables banks to create an eco-system of services through different solutions. By partnering, banks accept their own strengths and weaknesses, play to them and are able to select the right partners to fill in the gaps. The flexibility of this approach, mainly helped by the size and agility of the partnering fintechs, enables banks to launch innovative solutions quickly which seamlessly fit with this world of ever-changing customer expectations
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If you'd like to chat about how your bank can innovate at the speed of a fintech, get in touch.