Banks leverage AI, APIs, and agile tech to compete with fintechs, enhancing customer experience.

Digital banking dynamism continues to hold sway, as banks sharpen their transformation efforts to keep pace with rapid technological advancements. These advancements help them meet customers’ expectations and compete with more-agile Big Tech and fintech players, an ever-present threat.

At this year’s Sibos event, held in Beijing, there was a noticeable increase in the number of nonbanks in attendance —including fintechs and payment providers. There was also a panel discussion around wallet aggregators becoming Swift members. Nonbanks having put in the hard yards when banks were not prepared to, the reality of today’s banking landscape is that it is no longer the sole preserve of banks.

Artificial intelligence (AI) has the potential to aid efficiency, expand innovation, and personalize experiences in ways that give banks a competitive edge and resonate with modern consumers. AI is not new; banks have used it for credit scoring and fraud detection for many years. However, as AI technology continues to evolve, it is leading to more sophisticated and innovative applications in banking, ushering in advanced models for personalized services.

(Below are winners for Round II. The winners for Round I were announced in September’s edition.)

Bank of Georgia (BOG), our winner as World’s Best Digital Bank overall and Best Consumer Digital Bank, has gone to great lengths to tailor its solutions to specific customer needs through the power of machine learning and AI. “We strive to deliver a user experience that is customer-centric, straightforward, and inclusive,” states Archil Gachechiladze, the bank’s CEO.

Like BOG, Isbank, which takes the award for Best Mobile Banking App among consumer digital banks, offers super-app functionality. Deputy CEO Sezgin Lüle says 750,000 people have registered their cars on the İşCep app. “This means we know how old their cars are and their mileage. We can tell them when they need to get their cars serviced and ask them if they want to renew their car. The power of AI enables us to suggest smart nudges.”

AI capabilities are also helping to predict whether Isbank’s small and midsize enterprise (SME) clients will be in cash surplus or cash deficit during a specific period over the next 12 months. “This means we can offer extra facilities to finance or ask them whether they want to use surplus funds as an investment opportunity,” explains Lüle.

TD Bank, the Best Consumer Digital Bank in North America, has championed using AI-enhanced “nudges” within its app and is now using generative AI to speed up mortgage applications and code development.

Slovakia’s Tatra banka wins for Best Mobile Banking Adaptive Site among consumer digital banks, using machine learning for its Spending Plan, which includes a payment-prediction service that uses prognostic algorithms to enable it to warn users about recurring expenses, helping them better manage their cash flow between salary payments.

APIs Facilitating Digitalization

Application programming interfaces (APIs) are tools enabling more-advanced capabilities. By listening to its customers, DBS, a winner of multiple global and regional awards, identifies and develops effective solutions to meet particular objectives and to address specific problems or challenges. This helps power business transformation across industries and is bolstered by APIs. With over 280 APIs, DBS has the most extensive corporate-banking API library of any bank and saw more than 61% year-over-year growth, with 386 million calls during 2023.

“We have really reimagined ourselves to move from a product push to a proposition use case—really embodying ourselves into our customers’ journey,” says Tesy Mathew, group head of Cash Product Management, Global Transaction Services, at DBS. “This helps us to really look at what is their job to be done and what is the best way to do it.”

With DBS RAPID, clients can access 180 highly modular APIs to suit varying needs—such as real-time processing (RTP) of payments, receivables, and information inquiries. Whether it’s a case of ride-hailing companies where drivers want to get paid instantly rather than waiting a few days, or it’s a matter of instant insurance claim payments, Mathew says DBS can seamlessly embed itself into the process at any point to match client needs.

Over the last 12 months, Bank of America, winner of the Best Integrated Consumer Banking Site award, saw a 51% increase in clients using APIs via its CashPro digital banking platform. Companies are looking to enjoy the benefits of faster transaction speeds. RTP systems bring benefits and challenges to banks and corporations as they seek to keep up with customer expectations for instant payments. APIs provide a means to do this; however, many corporations must update their back-end systems first.

“One of our goals is to demystify the new payments landscape so that clients can take advantage of it,” states AJ McCray, head of Global Corporate Payments in Global Transaction Services at Bank of America. “We work with our clients to assess how—using their existing infrastructure—they can use new solutions to solve their specific problems or goals.” When selecting the best payment rails, McCray says treasurers should not need to consider that question. “They should just need to share what their priorities are—whether that is cost, or speed, or something else. We would then take that information and route the payment appropriately.”

Updating The Architecture

By building an in-house, digital, cloud-native core banking platform, Santander, our Best Corporate/Institutional Digital Bank in Western Europe, has enabled parallel processing of various bank operations. This will help Santander become fully digital, leading to faster transaction processing, improved customer experience, and increased operational efficiency.

Citi, our winner as Best Corporate/Institutional Digital Bank in North America, has also looked to technology to provide a cloud-first, microservices-based architecture. CitiDirect delivers all the capabilities provided by Citi’s Treasury and Trade Solutions. Naveed Anwar, head of Platforms and Data Services, says recent innovations include new advanced features. “Our global reach extends to more than 90 countries, and our investments in digital experiences such as onboarding, self-service, and the search engine are on a par with the best tech companies,” he says. “We’ve also built Citi Token Services, which is embedded into CitiDirect, using distributed ledger technology and smart contracts. Citi has created a patented programmable payment and liquidity platform, which will reduce costs and streamline processes.”

While already boasting its Sharia-compliant Nomo digital bank, Boubyan Bank, the Best Islamic Digital Bank both globally and for the Middle East, has partnered with Temenos to build an open, cloud-native, API-first architecture. This architecture will provide greater access to modern banking capabilities, with rich Islamic-banking functionality.

Collaboration with IBM to integrate hybrid cloud and AI solutions helped Alinma Bank, our Best in Transformation winner, to pivot from single- to multi-purpose apps, which include both embedded and open finance models — enabling the Saudi bank to distribute its services effectively, become a digital ecosystem orchestrator, and match customer life-cycle journeys. Users are now able to manage multiple accounts and investments, shop and pay bills, and receive tailored offers, while Alinma has enjoyed increased numbers of customers onboarded through digital channels: a 40% growth in digital transactions and a 75% digital financial transaction increase.

For all our winners, the key to providing advanced digital banking experiences lies in technological innovation, customer-centric design, and robust security measures. By adopting agile methodologies and advanced technical architecture, banks can quickly adapt to changing customer needs and market dynamics and prove themselves more than a match for nonbanks. From AI that empowers banks to offer tailored services at an unprecedented scale, to the seamless user experience created across channels via intuitive interfaces, banks have the tools to compete in a way that seemed unimaginable just a few years ago.

The expansion of open banking—enabling secure data sharing between banks, fintechs, and third-party providers through APIs—will continue to allow banks to provide personalized financial services as the future of banking continues to be reimagined.

The post World’s Best Digital Banks 2024: Global And Regional Winners appeared first on Global Finance Magazine.