Benefits of financial services sector disruption

What you need to know:

In the wholesale sector, worldwide transaction by corporates, mid-sized enterprises and public authorities are estimated to record more than 122 billion wholesale transactions.
There is a lot of uncertainty around what the financial services sector will look like in the next three to five years.
Customer expectations in the highly digitised space are disrupting and threatening traditional strong business capabilities like personalised and familiar customer services, pricing monopoly and risk pooling.

Today more than ever before, financial services sector is at its tip and it is either we disrupt or get disrupted. The 2017 World Payments Report indicated that global digital payments volumes are at approximately 726 billion transactions with volumes generated by emerging economies growing by 19.6 percent, or three-times the rate of mature economies.

In the wholesale sector, worldwide transaction by corporates, mid-sized enterprises and public authorities are estimated to record more than 122 billion wholesale transactions.

There is a lot of uncertainty around what the financial services sector will look like in the next three to five years.

Customer expectations in the highly digitised space are disrupting and threatening traditional strong business capabilities like personalised and familiar customer services, pricing monopoly and risk pooling.

Sector customers will certainly require banking services, however they may not turn to a banking hall to receive them because sharing economy is the new normal.

These forces that are disrupting the role, structure, and competitive environment for financial institutions and the markets and societies in which they operate should be entrenched into all decisions that are made in the sector.

This calls for reinvention in order to survive and thrive. More effort should be refocused to well thought through and unique digital agenda in terms of internet development and technology investments extending from customer experience and operational efficiency to big data and analytics.

The sector will require new agile collaborative organisational paradigm, new platforms to disrupt current distribution system, innovative digital savvy brand management approach, seamless payments using block chains, machine dominance trading, market place lending and saving apps and robotics to manage affairs.

These advancements will help in managing customer experience, mitigating risks, predictive social and emotional intelligence management, proactive identification of patterns and self-supervised learning, security physical sensors and many more. Certainly, these advancements will replace bank tellers.

Young people should reskills themselves to be ready for the new trends in the ecosystems. Payment solutions with innovative new solutions such as cardless payment and mobile apps targeting customer convenience and high level cyber security are quite critical.

Customers increasingly prefer connections, linking to comparable systems at partners and suppliers, wearables and mobile devices at an individual user level and enterprise mobility strategies to link employees and contractors.

Certified Back-office business services outsourcing services will be highly sort after. Young people should start thinking of how to accelerate transformations in this area. Block chain technology and robotics will soon be the new normal.

Finally, given the challenges in the cyber space, there will be need for specialised legal experts who can offer legal advisory services.

Young people should tap into these undeniable benefits and transformations that bring new agility and fresh acceleration in the sector.

Kellen Kiambati via email