Event

Forum Banca 2021

On October 5 the Bank Forum was held in Milan, the first in-person (and also streaming; by now the mix will always be a must!) event after the long stop.

First of all, I have to say that the atmosphere was definitely positive and the participants happy to walk around the halls and listen to the various contents, get together among colleagues and see each other in person. There were many topics at the Forum and even more industry professionals represented.
Already in the first plenary session, large universal banks, digital native banks, specialized banks were represented. In short, “Bank” is perhaps becoming a simplistic term for a very diverse universe of institutions.
Topics ranged from customer experience issues, to the importance of data, from security, to the topic of automation, to ESG integration. The line that united all these topics is inevitably technology. As Technology Reply, with our strong Financial Services specialization, we were present with the theme of “Virtual Branch,” a new “platform” developed precisely to bring customer and “teller” closer together in a virtual world. But we also illustrated through our Virtual Booth at the Forum several topics that today are the ones our clients are asking us to explore and implement for them: data streaming and data offloading (remaining always in the data theme), Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence to analyze documents in high quantities, extracting relevant information.
And again: accelerating development with low-code no-code applications and managing processes through new workflows.

Combining what we see every day standing by our customers, and what we heard and gathered in the Bank 2021 Forum, I leave you with these five points for reflection:

  1. Banks have been able to provide continuity of service and be supportive of society this past year and a half because they had already invested heavily in digitization. The healthcare emergency has only suddenly accelerated adoption. What will be the areas of major investment in the coming years? (..I'm betting on artificial intelligence.)
  2. We have been talking about the importance of data for many years now. All players have understood it and have built big structures (data lake, big data, data in cloud platforms), but the question remains how to use it and how to make it pay off. And perhaps most importantly, what skills and competencies (probably very different and diverse) are needed to be able to govern and profit from them?
  3. Business models continue to increase and change. Which ones will emerge as winners? How can technology support these different players? What will be the trade-off between specialization and scale?
  4. The banking ecosystem is increasingly expanding-not only new players but also new vistas to explore, such as alternative data, or the integration of ESG, the ecological transition path. How will banks decide to operate? And how will technology-savvy partners like Technology Reply work alongside their clients to find solutions?

We will keep you updated on these issues in the coming months.