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