There is need for Financial Institutions to ensure efficient service delivery across various channels in order to stay competitive in the market place; At the branch, efforts must be made to ensure customers get pleasant banking experiences; Hiring and maintaining skillful staff is key to realizing enterprise objectives; Automating all cash processes will improve efficiency; Personalization, utilizing efficient CRM tools at bank branches as well as ensuring enterprise wide communication channels that drives digital engagements (such as JETHRO’s jDelivery), would have positive impact on customer experience and loyalty, The Financial Brand, report highlighted.

Similarly, Capgemini opined that: Major Tech. companies will continue to disrupt the banking space in the coming months; APIs will continue to play major role in the expansion of Open Banking; Cloud solutions adoption by banks will become mainstream; FIs would need to fast track digital transformations; Chat bots will become the new norm in banking; and many FIs would need to improve customer experience with AI, data security, policy and compliance.

Furthermore, a recent FS-ISAC report stated that prevalent forms of fraud affecting FIs such as account takeover, cash advance, online banking and mobile wallet transaction fraud; fake wire transfer request; phishing and Vishing of customer data and social engineering will rise tremendously in the coming months. The report suggested that banks should utilize two-factor authentication systems (such as JETHRO’s jPrivacy) as an additional layer of security.

Also, as mobile channels continue to experience customer usage volumes, susceptibility to hackers will rise; for instance fraud via USSD, SIM-jacking and SIM swap fraud will increase immensely in the coming months. There is need for effective collaboration between financial institutions and mobile service providers. In the report by Paymentsource, Amite Bhute said “Artificial intelligence will play a major role in tackling payments fraud, with the predictive abilities of machine learning helping to detect hidden flaws and reacting to fraud faster”.

Similarly, the usage of technologies such as Business Intelligence, AI, and Machine Learning, together with large volumes of customer data will enable, more banks to create predictive profiles of customers in real time, allowing banks to play financial advisory roles to their customers and real-time fraud detection.  

In conclusion, the payment industry will experience technological innovations in Internet of Things (IOT), point of sale (POS), mobile wallets, cryptocurrencies, and blockchain. POS will see “cross-channel, point of sale solutions integrated with the merchant back-office and financing options to reach scale”; API-based partnerships with back-office solution providers will occur as highlighted by; The Financial Brand report. Additionally, more data sharing and standardization APIs will be seen in payments; APIs in payment will experience improved ecosystem of solutions in account aggregations and integrated payments, the Mobilepaymentstoday report stated.