The time has long passed when you had to stay in queues at bank branches. Now all operations can be completed online, almost every self-respecting bank has a mobile application, and to pay by credit card, the card itself is no longer needed.
Today, banks are no longer divided into “digital” and “non-digital” – the question is how much attention is paid to digital services and which ones are developing in the first place. Mobile banking has long ceased to be a side option of the Internet version, the complexity of services at the same time means simplifying the work with them, and biometrics is about to make it possible to transfer all services to the online, without a trace.
Online banking today occupies a very significant place in our daily lives and continues to develop rapidly. This is facilitated primarily by the improvement of mobile technologies and the emergence of new payment services from industry leaders. Despite this, the “classic” Internet banking does not give up its positions, and in general, according to statistics, transactions for a large amount are most often made by the user in the desktop version.
Henri Arslanyan, head of Hong Kong-based PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC), a fintech and cryptocurrency unit, believes that 2019 may be the arrival of an array of institutional players. And this is a great chance for Metahash to break into a big game to become an important part of this large system.
Banks are betting on the development of mobile applications. In practice, this is expressed in two aspects: the transfer of all Internet banking capabilities to a mobile application (zeroing gaps), as well as the introduction of new functionality in priority order in applications – mobile-first. What the user is accustomed to receiving in other mobile applications – the functionality of popular search engines and aggregators, the efficiency of taxi services and pizza delivery, is embodied in the functionality of mobile banking applications.
At the same time, user experience comes first – even if the user is already a bank customer, it is important whether he will use the bank’s application to solving his financial problems or whether he prefers to withdraw money to other applications and other banks. In a world where application functionality has gone beyond basic needs, competition in convenience and simplicity is relevant. There is a demand for an “online office” – access to new products from Internet banking and mobile application. The logical development of this scenario is gaining ground – the institution of the client “from the street” without visiting a physical office. This option from the category of exotic goes into the category of popular and sought after.
Many market participants note that online banking in each of its examples goes through several stages of development. Remote Bank – Digital Office – Digital Platform – Ecosystem and so on. The further it develops, the more functions and channels it closes on itself. Large banks with a large amount of data and resources already live in the fourth stage, Internet banks for small businesses, one might say, were born in the second – so as not to spend energy and money offline.
Now banks are gradually developing biometric identification. While this technology works only for individuals, but as soon as it becomes mass enough, there is a reason to believe that the b2b segment will be of interest to it very quickly. With the help of biometric technologies, an entrepreneur will be able to completely go online working with a bank and conduct all operations without ever visiting his office.
The subject of biometrics is controversial. On the one hand, for banks, it is an opportunity to enter a wide market and attract new customers, but in practice, everything can rest on the mentality of our citizens, who are wary of such innovations. Not everyone wants, for example, to remotely place a deposit using biometrics. But for the lending market, in my opinion, this will be a powerful driver. To work with biometrics, a client needs to have an account on the Unified portal of public services, and not everyone has it. In any case, biometrics is progress and a real step, allowing you to make a “bank on the couch” so that the client can remotely receive any banking service or product.
