Tag: Banks

Deconstructing the Digital Assets Revolution – What Financial Institutions Can Learn from the Meteoric Rise of Coinbase | Blog

Digital assets have come a long way from only being Bitcoin to a complete array of increasingly used financial assets. Coinbase’s striking rise has demonstrated a growing acceptance for cryptocurrency that could stick with traditional investors. Is the future for digital currency real, and what obstacles do banks and financial institutions face to compete in this growing crypto market? Read on to learn more of our insights on the next-generation currency movement.  

Growing digital asset options

When Coinbase became the first major cryptocurrency start-up to go public on a U.S. stock market this April, the world started giving crypto more legitimacy and the company’s astronomical valuation has garnered great attention.

Along with the skyrocketing value of cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoins and Ethereum, Coinbase – the preferred platform for U.S. investors to purchase these assets – has grown ninefold over the past year. The investment trend over the past five years suggests that cryptocurrency valuation will cross US$24 trillion by 2027.

This rocketing rise can be attributed to increased interest by retail and institutional investors that started investing in Bitcoins and Altcoins as another option to falling interest rates across the world. Other crypto assets such as Non-Fungible Tokens (NFT) traded nine times in the first half of 2021.

Crypto assets have experienced great growth since their early days. Some of the new types (described below in Exhibit 1 and 2) have unique use cases and designs.

Exhibit 1

Picture1 1

Exhibit 2

Picture4

Investors paying attention

Improved technology and better financial services have fueled a remarkable demand in digital assets, especially by institutional investors, over the past 18 months.  Investor groups are getting involved in the market for various reasons, including:

  • Retail investors – improved personal finance management, easier payment and remittance services, and increased transparency offered by Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT) through openly verifiable and immutable transaction history databases
  • Institutional and High Net Worth (HNW) investors – lower operational costs, high reliability and security, faster transaction processing and almost real-time tracing of contracts and payments, and improved access to liquidity for fundraising

Technology firms partnering

As investor interest grows, several FinTechs and BigTechs are investing in technology and infrastructure to support digital assets. Google has partnered with exchange platforms Paxful and Coinbase to add crypto-based transactions on Google Pay. This also allows users to buy Bitcoins and pay using them. Similarly, leading banking software firms such as Temenos recently partnered with specialist digital asset and blockchain infrastructure player Taurus to help banks bridge the gap between traditional and digital assets.

Early access to data will give FinTechs and BigTechs an edge to better understand investor profiles, investment willingness, and funding goals of a large pool of clients. These larger investor groups are also nimble enough to partner with smaller FinTechs and InsurTechs to provide specialty services through a common digital platform.

Opportunities for banks

Since banks would need to cut through bureaucracy, change management challenges, and garner huge financial resources, it is not likely they will develop these technologies quickly enough for the market’s fast pace. However, we believe that increased participation from traditional financial institutions in managing digital assets will pave the way for digital assets in mainstream banking and payments systems as regulations improve.

Large financial institutions such as BNY Mellon recently invested in building a team of technology and business professionals to develop products and platforms that will allow customers to manage cryptocurrency alongside all their other assets. The custodian also received permission from regulatory bodies to offer crypto custodian services in February 2021.

Similarly, Singapore’s DBS Bank received approval earlier this year from the Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS) to launch the DBS Digital Exchange for tokenized assets. Global banks such as Deutsche Bank are also building services such as institutional-grade hot and cold storage with insured protection for custody services. Huge potential exists to tap into business segments such as wealth management, estate services, financial planning, and asset services in crypto markets since the current penetration is very low.

To stay ahead of the curve, banks should follow this three-pronged strategy to build, partner, and acquire digital assets skillsets in the market:

  • Partner and collaborate: Traditional financial institutions will face several issues in developing
    in-house solutions to adopt new financial technologies, such as updating legacy systems and regularly innovating solutions offered to remain competitive in the market and keep up with global regulations. These institutions can partner with FinTechs specializing in developing and servicing such solutions at a global scale in a plug-and-play model
  • Build and develop: Large financial services firms are developing capabilities and skillsets to stay ahead of the competition in the crypto asset services market. Large Banking and Financial Services (BFS) firms such as Wells Fargo have introduced cryptocurrency funds focused on high net-worth individuals. Similarly, JP Morgan has already tested its stablecoin, JPM Coin, which has been pegged against the U.S. Dollar, and offers a solution to cross-border trade between banks and corporates over blockchain
  • Acquire and invest: Financial institutions can nurture and acquire FinTechs start-ups that are aligned with the future of financial technology. They can also directly acquire solutions already developed in the market to enhance their platforms in serving their customers with the latest technologies

 Exhibit 3

Picture3

Regulatory and other obstacles to overcome

While its potential is promising, banks still face many challenges around regulations, disaster management, private key recovery, insurance-backed custody, and systems for fraud prevention. The biggest roadblock for BFS firms is the lack of clarity of a regulatory framework around digital assets. The process of building a regulatory framework for digital assets will take several years and be iterative. In the interim, policies that are uncertain and not applicable to digital assets should be brought to the notice of regulators and industry bodies as they continuously evaluate policies and provide clarifications.

Banks and financial institutions also will need to make enormous investments in data and technology systems to manage the Risk and Compliance (R&C) around digital assets. Financial institutions will have to adopt a compliance-by-design approach to build platforms to manage the digital assets transactions and the associated mid- and back-office operations. This will require building new data and technology systems for R&C initiatives as no commercially off-the-shelf software in the market has matured enough to manage scaled compliance workflows and operations for digital assets.

For more insights on digital assets adoption, please read our detailed perspective in the report, Deconstructing the Digital Assets Revolution – What Financial Institutions Can Learn from the Meteoric Rise of Coinbase.

If you would like to share your observations or questions on the evolving digital assets landscape, please reach out to [email protected], [email protected], or [email protected].

Unraveling the Complexities of Financial Crime Data Management | Webinar

Session held live on Wednesday, April 3, 2019 | 11:00 a.m. EST | Hosted by Genpact with featured speaker, Manu Aggarwal, Practice Director, Everest Group

View the Recorded Session

For many risk and compliance executives in the banking industry, high false positive rates and investigation inefficiencies are still their biggest pain points. Meanwhile, the pressure to fight financial crime, cut costs, and reduce inefficiencies continues to escalate.

Join this webinar discussion on why financial institutions need to look beyond these pain points, which are just the “tip of the iceberg”. Together, we will examine how to solve the much more daunting problem of data management that lurks beneath the surface.

Guest Speaker

Manu Aggarwal, Practice Director, Everest Group

New Enemy of Outsourcing: DIY by Banks | In the News

Here’s the big reason why most of the big IT services companies are still struggling to accelerate: Many large banks have got into a do-it-yourself mode for their IT. Where once they outsourced work, they are now choosing to do more of it in-house, mostly in their own global inhouse centres (GICs) in countries like India.

Peter Bendor-Samuel, CEO of IT research & consulting firm Everest Group, said the Indian players have been living in denial. “They have all been forecasting good years in banking and we have been telling them that for many reasons this was unlikely to happen. The banks’ GICs have matured and they are clearly growing them at the expense of third parties. For some functions, they are also bringing work back on-shore and this work they are keeping in-house. They have largely decided that they like the big Indian firms as their legacy (partners to maintain their traditional IT),” he said.

Read more in The Times of India

Investments in Digital Pay Off for Retail Banks | Sherpas in Blue Shirts

Our banking analyst team just finished its evaluation of how the leading North American retail banks are doing in their efforts to create the best digital customer experience, and we want to share some highlights from this breakthrough research. This is our third year of assessing 30 of the largest retail banks. The premise for the research is to examine the new consumption context of financial services – where customers are demanding a SUPER (Secure, Ubiquitous, Personalized, Easy, Responsive) banking experience.

Our research assessed the functionality and pervasiveness of the banks’ consumer-facing digital interaction layer to help establish correlations with superior customer experiences, stronger customer engagement, and higher overall business growth.

Based on our research, nine U.S. banks (Ally Bank, Bank of America, Capital One, Chase, Citi, PNC, SunTrust, USAA Bank, and Wells Fargo) and two Canadian banks (CIBC and RBC) have been featured as “Digital Banking Pinnacle Enterprises™.” These banks demonstrated business results that stood above the rest:

  • Better growth – 3% higher growth in deposits
  • Better efficiency – 9% lower efficiency ratio
  • Better customer experience – 20% higher mobile application ratings

We have also recognized four retail banks as “Agile Performers,” as they made the greatest improvements in 2017. These banks include Ally Bank and Bank of America, both of which launched multiple initiatives to meet millennials’ customer experience expectations, such as virtual assistants for personalized experiences and voice-command enabled banking capabilities. USAA demonstrated best-in-class adoption of digital banking channels and maintained its frontrunner position in customer-centric innovation. USAA also joined the cryptocurrency world by adding the ability to display customers’ bitcoin balances. SunTrust made considerable investments into self-service technologies across its branch network and recorded strong growth in customer engagement on social media.

retail-banking-digital-pinnacle-banks

The retail banking industry will continue to make dramatic changes in the next few years. These shifts will require banks to have increased capabilities to deliver an enhanced customer experience whose key elements include:

  • A paradigm shift from the current “product” mindset to a “customer lifestyle” mindset to combine, package, and offer products/services from banking and allied businesses
  • Open banking and partner ecosystems leveraging APIs to integrate third-party services into the bank’s digital banking platforms
  • Collapsing the siloes across the front-, mid-, and back-office to create a frictionless front-to-back experience
  • Harmonized data repositories to enable a unified view of the customer
  • A technology operating model that embraces automation, AI, blockchain, and cloud to enable the needs of the “new business”

We believe the current Digital Banking Pinnacle Enterprises have created superior customer experiences because they deliberately invested in their digital capabilities. But the bar for success is constantly moving, as the industry continues to witness rapid and significant changes. Nonetheless, our data from the last three years establishes an increasing correlation between digital functionality and business outcomes. Banks that are able to quickly adopt a human-centered design thinking approach, build usable experiences, and create a culture of obsessive customer focus will be able to better differentiated experiences, achieve growth, create shareholder value, and ensure market relevance.

To read all of our research findings, see our report: Digital Effectiveness in Retail Banking | Pinnacle Model™ Assessment 2018: Journey of North American Banks to Build SUPER Experiences

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