Southeast Asia, banks are embarking on the next phase of their digital transformation, focusing heavily on improving customer experiences, leveraging data and analytics, and investing in cloud-based core banking systems as well as intelligent technologies.
While COVID-19 pushed incumbents to focus on business continuity, establish remote operations and enable digital customer interactions, they’ve now moved into the next step of their digital agenda, shifting the focus to enhancing their use of data and better understanding their customers’ needs.
banks believe utilizing data from a multitude of different sources will be critical in enabling them to get a deeper understanding of their customers. In Singapore, 33% of bank leaders indicated wanting to make use of customer data across different systems.
Banks also believe data can help them build new offerings that are more in-tune with their customers’ preferences and needs.
Despite bold ambitions for digital transformation, the study also revealed several challenges hindering banks from making significant progress on executing their plans.
The COVID-19 pandemic, regulatory obstacles, legacy technologies and core systems, as well as the lack of operational agility were identified as the top barriers for Southeast Asian banks.
Across the region, regulators have amended rules and introduced regulatory frameworks to allow and/or facilitate the entry of digital-first competitors.