It’s been a tumultuous few weeks for the financial industry, with UBS’ takeover of Credit Suisse the latest news event that’s sure to have aftershocks for weeks and months to come.  

Within all the chaos, though, we’re also hearing a throughline of assurance that one thing is not in flux: FinServs’ dedication to digital innovation. In fact, the recent turmoil has, in many ways, underscored the need for swift and decisive technology leadership.  

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This week’s edition comes in a moment of tumult and uncertainty for the finance and technology sectors, as the side effects from Silicon Valley Bank’s collapse continue to unfold.  

While most of the narratives around SVB’s fallout don’t directly relate to financial firms’ technology strategies, the themes of resilience and adaptability certainly apply. Accordingly, several stories in this edition highlight how the best stopgaps against tech troubles are backup plans, robust data, experimentation, and trust. 

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This week’s edition dives into several different ways that banks are combining digital innovation and the human touch.  

This week’s edition dives into the ways that banks combine digital innovation and the human touch.  

Afterall, financial firms often struggle to balance tech sophistication with a lack of friction: For example, banks often ask themselves, “How do I bring together all of my consumer data and build intelligent applications on top that are consumer friendly?” according to the president of Washington Federal spinoff Archway. More on that story, and four more, below.   

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This week’s edition delves into the different ways that banks are threading the needle: Between catching fraudsters and offering seamless customer experiences. Between digital interfaces and human-to-human connection. Between compliance risk and cutting-edge technology. 

“Banks are extremely allergic to risks (as they should be),” a principal at tech consultancy Capco told Insights Distilled for our story on ChatGPT. Still, they need to find a way to “encourage innovation while also prioritizing data privacy and security.”   

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For US readers coming back from a long weekend, we hope it was restful.  

Our latest edition includes several stories of digital transformation in progress, from US Bank’s plan to upskill thousands of its employees to a new solution for banks’ fintech integration woes.  

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It’s Valentine’s Day, and love is in the air.  

Love between banks and startups that needed funding. Love from customers for wealth management tools. Love between financial services firms and the platforms that drive efficiency for them. 

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This week’s edition provides several perspectives on the power of combining tech innovation with human insights.

In one feature, people provided a crucial backstop to preventing calamity after a trading software company got hacked. In another, an exec explains how her firm is trying to turn investors into “cyborgs” by equipping them with the latest AI tools to guide their decision-making.  

“We believe very strongly that it’s not that algorithms and machines will replace human beings: It’s just that human beings with algorithms, we think, will outcompete humans who don’t have them,” she said. 

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This week’s edition centers on acquisitions of all kinds.  

We bring you features on how big banks are roping in (and keeping) talent, why a tech firm just bought ING’s homegrown compliance tools, and how a payroll startup is winning bank evangelists, among other stories.  

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This week’s edition centers on giving credit where it’s due.  

We highlight how innovative startups are helping incumbents super-charge their ability to offer loans, whether to immigrants or SMBs. And in another sense of the phrase, we spotlight how banks have continued to reap results from their digital transformation efforts.  

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Upwards of 75% of banking leaders say they feel “pressured” to collaborate more with fintechs to meet consumer demand, according to a new survey of 800 execs, but many are still “wrestling with the challenges of doing so.” 

To that end, this week’s edition features stories about the ways in which incumbents are finding success with digital upstarts, whether through investments, acquisitions, or partnerships. 

While fintech tie-ups can certainly go wrong – for example, JPMorgan is currently embroiled in a messy legal battle with a startup it purchased that it says falsified its userbase – there’s greater risk in not pursuing these relationships at all.  

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January is financial wellness month, and the stories in this week’s edition approach that theme from several different angles, from the literal – like how financial upstarts are wooing young people by making it fun to build their money skills – to the figurative – like how recent headlines highlight a need for upgraded fraud protections. 

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Happy 2023!  

We look forward to another year of helping you cut through the noise by highlighting the most important technology stories every week, with context on why they matter. 

It’s fitting that the features in this edition focus on technology topics that will help shape the financial services industry in the upcoming year – from new policies and cyber-resiliency to virtual reality and DEI-focused data. 

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As the end of the year draws near and we prepare to launch into 2023, we’re feeling reflective – both on the top features and trends of the past six months and on our gratefulness for subscribers like you. 

Thank you for being a reader in 2022. Since launching this newsletter in August, we’ve brought you fascinating case studies, actionable advice, exclusive executive interviews, need-to-know product news, and more.  

We hope that our insights have been valuable to you – if so, please consider sharing this newsletter with a colleague or friend. And if you have advice on ways we could improve in the new year, please let us know (you can simply reply to this email with your thoughts).   

Now, on to our review of the themes and stories that shaped the year – let’s dive in:  

With the holidays upon us, this week’s stories spotlight gifts – namely, those that startups use to win customers and market share from incumbents, including speed, focus, and infrastructure that’s free of technical debt. 

Big financial institutions aren’t typically blessed with those abilities. As one exec we spoke to bluntly put it: They’re “not structured for rapid innovation” like fintechs. 

That’s why the financial institutions highlighted in this edition are finding ways to share in those benefits, whether through investments, partnerships, or revamping their own organizational structure. 

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This week’s edition features several stories that highlight how financial services firms are making concrete inroads as they build towards the tech innovations that will shape the future. 

For example, Deutsche Bank is deploying digital avatars that will eventually be used in the metaverse, Mastercard is expanding its partnerships to ultimately improve cross-border money movement, and big banks are beginning to embrace open source software with gusto.  

These features spotlight forward momentum or milestones, even as the full promise of a given technology has not yet been reached. As the executive director of open source group FINOS put it: “We know there is still a lot of work to do to reach full maturity.” But the progress, of course, is important. 

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This week’s edition is all about getting personal.  

One of the promises of artificial intelligence and automation is that they make it easier to enable customized user experiences, at a lower cost. That framework is on display in several of this week’s stories, including features on Wells Fargo’s new business banking tool or National Australia Bank’s customer service solution.  

Each of these pieces demonstrates how big financial institutions can use technology to become more customer-centric. After all, as JPMorgan’s chief information officer put it earlier this year, “The future of banking really is personalization.”  

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The holidays tend to bring good food, time with loved ones, special moments – and financial fraud. ‘Tis the season for scams, spoofs, and swindles.  

Several stories in this week’s edition highlight tales of how bad actors may try to wreak havoc, as well as the tech-enabled preventative measures that financial institutions can take to block them.  

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With Thanksgiving on the horizon for our US readers, this week’s edition spotlights giving, abundance, and relationships.

From the story of how a freshly-funded neobank is serving its target audience with tailored features, to an overview on the bounty of fintechs ripe for M&A, and a perspective on the shifting interconnection between banks and merchants, we have a feast of interesting pieces for you.  

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Several of this week’s stories spotlight how banks are making big investments to earn goodwill with customers and stand out from their competitors.

From Capital One’s travel spending or Standard Chartered’s fresh fintech partnership, to JPMorgan’s commitment to “accept any payment, anytime, anywhere,” the features in this week’s edition spotlight the ways financial firms are willing to work to create “win-win” situations.  

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Happy election day to our US readers. Make sure to get out there and vote, if you haven’t already! 

Fittingly, several stories in this week’s edition focus on the power of people: Even in this age of digital disruption, there’s huge value in adding a human touch to new products and services. People and technology are both more powerful when they work in tandem, whether for portfolio management, financial advice, or data wrangling.   

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This week’s edition highlights how important external partnerships can be for launching new features or maintaining the highest technology standards within a legacy financial institution. From BNY Mellon’s cybersecurity stance to NatWest’s embrace of new payments options, the most innovative offerings often require teamwork between firms.  

This week’s edition underscores the role that company culture plays in building innovative products.  

Two of our featured stories touch on talent – with tips from a Visa exec on hiring underrepresented engineers and advice from Goldman Sachs’ CIO on keeping developers excited about their work – while another spotlights a tech-enabled workaround for easier partnerships between fintechs and incumbent banks. 

Diverse, motivated, and collaborative teams: A recipe for inventive products.  

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This week’s edition highlights how tech-enabled cost savings can drive other investments across a firm.  

As Brian Moynihan put it during Bank of America’s third quarter earnings, “operational process improvements” are paying for its other initiatives: 

“Continued digitization allows us to continue to be efficient and effective and, frankly, plow the money saved back into marketing, back into more technology to make us even more effective, and then back into the people where we need them,” Moynihan said. 

The stories below demonstrate how BofA and other financial institutions have leveraged efficiencies to propel other investments, like increased hiring or more capital for business customers.  

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This week’s edition highlights examples of big banks thinking like fintechs as they fight to keep their customers satisfied. Whether through rolling out new, value-add tools or by making it easier to access their services, the banks featured in these stories are trying to strengthen their relationships with customers to avoid being replaced.   

“PayTech providers have set the pace, implementing composable technologies, essentially allowing them to personalize their offerings,” Capgemini’s global industry head, Nilesh Vaidya, told Insights Distilled. Legacy banks need to find ways to keep up by customizing their products, too.  

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This week’s edition highlights several examples of what a Mastercard engineer describes as a technological “butterfly effect,” where a small change (or issue) has ripple effects through a platform or ecosystem.  

Whether it’s a rogue database query that could wreak havoc on a complex IT system or integrated international credit data that can help immigrants live healthier financial lives, the stories in this edition highlight the power of a tech-enabled shift.  

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This edition spotlights the varied ways that big financial institutions use technology to serve distinct stakeholders, including their consumer users, their corporate clients, and themselves.  

The banks’ use cases on display range from banishing passwords or launching fraud-flagging AI to automating their own trade settlement operations, and involve internal innovation, partnerships, or investments.

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Hello from the Bank Automation Summit happening this week in Seattle.  

As fintech founders rub shoulders with banking execs, it’s no surprise that one of the big themes is how to build successful, strategic technology relationships.  

For any given launch – whether it involves overdue modernization or a cutting-edge new product – execs need to weigh whether to build products internally, buy from a vendor, or form deeper, substantial partnerships with providers.  

And if you choose the latter, what does that look like? “For a true partnership, the relationship must be a win-win: It has to work for both parties and be a marriage of equals,” Citi’s Mohit Narula said during a panel session on Monday. “Those are the partnerships that usually succeed.” 

This week’s edition highlights the dynamic, wide-ranging nature of tech relationships and spotlights a variety of different models, from partnerships to acquisitions. Let’s dive in: