The Future of Banking

On the eve of the new millennium, the Spanish banking institution was shaken by the advent of mobile banking. But when a Dutch bank created the concept of total digital banking with web access and an app that were streamlined and user-friendly, and which furthermore eliminated the need to pop out to the nearest branch office, a new young Spanish client was not far behind. This new breed of client quickly assimilated to managing personal banking in a virtual environment, thereby gaining on practicality and time.

Given such change, the more traditional Spanish bank was has been forced to reinvent itself. The work of thousands of branch-office employees was no longer needed whilst still more employees would need to adapt to new ways of working and relating to the customer. Today, Spanish banking is digitally mature, but the process of change continues.

With Santander at the helm, Spanish banking is leading the industry. The institution has been able to adapt to the changes of the digital age, and Spain is now European leader in the use of the mobile management of finances. However, one of the characteristics of the digital platform is its unceasing dynamism. Despite all banks having online operations, mobile applications and even digital brands (Open Bank in the case of Santander), the market for virtual financial services is constantly being refined and redefined. In the last few years, the abundance of Fintech products have burst onto the culture of financial banking prolifically; these include technological applications hooked up to the banking network to provide a huge range of financial services aiding clients in their acquisition of financial products.

In this context of extreme technological and financial dynamism, Santander, Spain’s biggest bank, has embarked on a process to develop its digital banking. It asked Opinno to carry out a training event in Digital Transformation for the Consumer Finance departments of the business.

So now what?

Faced with the current situation, we took on the job of identifying the challenges Banco Santander would face in the coming years. In order to do so, we created a climate of inspiration and learning for the workers of the bank in our interactive training workshops.

A digital transformation took place wherein trainees actively participated in the workshops and took away the transformative digital knowledge which was the goal behind them. In particular, trainees were also introduced to trends such as:

• Singularity - the ability of computers to make decisions that are superior to humans

• Big Data - mass data processing that exceeds the computing capacity of conventional computers

• Business Intelligence - the conversion of data to information and from information to knowledge to apply to the banking business

Further workshop aims were to better understand how these many trends are transforming companies in the financial sector.

Opinno – helping to bring big changes to one the banking institutions biggest players.