Finansliv, Sweden: Cognizant’s Head of Banking and Financial Services for Continental Europe Talks About Challenges to Innovation in the Nordic Banking Sector

“It has been several years since Swedish banks transitioned from brick and mortar to predominantly digital organizations and by handling the digitalization challenges, banks will be better able to benefit from the rapidly developing trends in mobile banking, and thereby progress and innovate alongside changing customer expectations,” says Sriniketh Chakravarthi. Excerpts:

“To do this, banks need to reexamine their legacy IT solutions. In fact, across Europe, banks are investing heavily in transitioning from traditional IT systems to newer, more disruptive platforms such as social, mobile, analytics and cloud (SMAC), a shift that is further driven by a requirement for up-to-date, flexible and cost-efficient IT systems.

For Swedish banks, which traditionally use mostly local IT partners, making necessary upgrades to existing legacy IT systems can be expensive. The banks are also expected to upgrade their offerings of innovative banking services continuously, especially around mobile banking, but also around other secure and personalized banking services.

One thing is for certain: having less money left for innovation could be dangerous for banks right now. The banks’ traditional role as enablers of people’s personal finances, at any time and instantly, and gatekeepers in card payment transactions is being challenged by new non-bank actors such as Tink, Google Wallet, Apple Pay, Klarna and Fixura.

Without having IT solutions that can be developed at the same pace as customer demand changes, banks risk being abandoned by customers who show few signs of being loyal and certainly have come to expect more.”

Click here to read the article in Swedish.