Seamless Digitising

Technology-led transformation is impacting banking like never before. While retail banking embraced the digital revolution a few years ago, the landscape of corporate banking is no longer a tech-dinosaur. For BNP Paribas, our clients are at the center of our universe, and they want us to provide the most relevant data to guide them in an increasingly complex and globally integrated financial world.

Banks face four major challenges: Telecoms and big tech companies are entering the financial services market, and significant activity in the digital payments space is being led by non-banks. Mobile wallets and tech giants have made inroads by launching convenient payments solutions and the digital payments landscape is expected to evolve rapidly in the coming years. Digital technology is establishing new rules and requirements. For example, fintech ventures use algorithms, user behaviour and patterns to provide greater and personalised access to credit. A recent Global Distribution and Marketing Consumer study by Accenture states that 83 per cent of customers care most about low cost without any compromise on the saving. Our pragmatic approach to fintech helps us meet two main goals—to rethink the banking experience and to accelerate the bank’s positive impact on society.

We have always believed that consumer-led development is a differentiating factor that delivers value-added features with a standard offer and helps win long-term loyalty from clients. This approach keeps us agile in adopting new technology and fostering the co-creation of products. Similarly, we provide our clients with holistic solutions that meet their working capital needs through innovative solutions, superior structuring capabilities and state of the art technology.

At a Group level, BNP Paribas has launched a special investment fund that aims to take minority positions in the most promising fintechs that develop services and solutions linked to key functions within the group, which includes consumer pathways, asset management, etc. Going digital is a big part of our strategy and aligns with the broader trend of going slow on opening branches. As a group, we look at bringing about 3.4 billion euros of savings from our digital investments and expect nearly 80 per cent of that saving to be recurring. This would help the company cut its cost-income ratio to 63 per cent by 2020.

In a world where digital and physical services go hand-in-hand, it’s crucial for banks to streamline customer journeys more than ever. Digitisation, automation, and analytics have disrupted much of the retail banking and wealth-management worlds already. But large sections of the commercial banking world still rely on manual processes, despite their replacement by technology platforms at several banks. Commercial banks are experimenting with digital over the full scope of operational, policy, partnerships, analytics, data, innovation, and front- and back-end technology, but have yet to reach their full potential. According to a Mckinsey study, digitising of commercial processes can result in 25 per cent improvements to commercial banks’ margins along with improved pull-through rate and experience for both RMs and clients (significantly improving customer satisfaction scores).  With digitisation, we aim to provide a seamless delivery channel to our clients around the world, through our network, along with bespoke advisory.