http://ukadventureracing.co.uk/category/uncategorized/ I am attending Sibos, the international Swift conference in Osaka. After the first day, several themes are becoming apparent. This is a post about “what everybody is talking about”, or at least what I heard… Of course, most people talk sales here, and the amount of business deals and/or discussion about future deals seems impressing. However my interest is at the “trends” level, so here is what I see as a developing consensus:
- There is an understanding that it is imperative for banks to embrace the need to change as both a way to grow and a way to survive
- Agreement across board that banks need to move to digital banking
- Agility as a concept that banks need to embrace to be able to change before it’s too late
- Everybody knows that “the future is mobile” and many are already doing something about it
- Most banks have heard of “big data” but very few companies have a view of how it is different from what they do today or what is the business benefit for banks. I have seen several times in presentations that facebook has 1 billion users and that we tweet 600 times per second. And this means what?
- Most bankers think that banks should not use social computing for more than advertising and branding. Not a safe place to be for transactions…
So yes, we are starting to see trends consolidating in bankers minds: digital, mobile, social, big data. And no clear next steps yet, no “list of projects” that “everybody is doing”… We have the facts and we, as an industry, are not clear yet on what it means. Today we need fewer futurists, and more strategists and delivery teams.