Banks need to strike the right balance for digital transformation

Every financial institution is looking to digital transformation to meet rising customer expectations for speed and convenience, lower its operating cost, and fend off competition, including from tech companies moving into financial services. Some are spending over 10% of yearly revenue on technology investments, according to Bloomberg. "This is a huge investment and most financial institutions cannot support this for the long term," says Michael Fei, SME banking CEO at OneConnect Financial Technology, an associate of Ping An Insurance. The covid-19 pandemic has revealed how even financial institutions that considered themselves digitally advanced are, in reality, still wedded to analog processes along the chain of processing. "For many financial institutions, this has been a wake-up call," says Fei. "In the past, many had thought that if they have an online portal and a mobile application then that's enough. But now they've realized it's not. Some banks have online portals and mobile apps where you can apply for loans, but they still need to send items to the customer and carry out on-site inspection before they can process the loans, which hasn't been possible during covid. Banks have had to reshape and redesign the whole process of their lending products."