The year 2018 has seen the culmination of some vital technologies from Artificial Intelligence and Blockchain to design and the cloud. With the foundation of the banking sector shifting, banks need to become digital, customer-centric and data-driven. But thankfully the emerging technologies and digital solutions will assist banks to deliver their best in 2019.

Below we have given a few trends that shape the banking and financial sectors in 2019

Omni-channel Marketing

In today’s world marketing is smaller touch points or interactions with your customers rather than visiting a bank. Just getting your ads up by a PPC advertising company is certainly not enough as you should be multichannel. The last five years saw the advent of online banking the biggest change in the financial sector where you can check your balance, apply for credit card or open an account sitting in the vicinity of your home or office. Financial institutions should rely on small personalized on-demand services to interact with consumers. Your brand visible only for a few seconds in multiple places will have more influence than a large scale interaction.

AI & Blockchain Technology

AI and Blockchain will disrupt the banking and financial sectors in 2019. It will be imperative to implement blockchain in the infrastructure of financial institutions as it will keep your records linked together keeping them secure like a permanent ledger. AI will focus on subjective use in marketing, investments and wealth management of the financial industry. This is a time when predictive analytics and machine learning will give way to cognitive computing.

Design Thinking & User Experience

Design thinking in combination with creative engineering will bring UX vision to reality. This will be done to enhance the user experience by being simple and easily accessible at the time of interaction with the product. The only interaction that the majority of users will have with banks is online banking. The app should be simple, transparent and interactive providing users with the information they require and whenever required connect them to customer care.

Data-Based Marketing

Financial institutions have large amounts of data to be used for predictive marketing programs for targeting specific groups of people. Micro-moments are created in marketing, whereby people will search on their devices with the answers being provided by the company. Historical data, when combined with AI and SEO service companies, will help to generate content as well as supply information to people they require. Moreover, the new data infrastructure has to comply with upcoming new data requirements like Payments Services Directive II and General Data Protection Regulation. Thus data visualization, data virtualization and data lineage are used for extracting additional value from data.

The Cloud

2019 will see the banking sector adopting Cloud services but emphasizing on security and regulatory compliance both in front and centre. Banks and other financial institutions will create cloud-enabled business models in the years to come. Furthermore, the use of API will result in driving more consumer applications to the cloud.

Addressing these new trends is by no means as simple as it looks for banks, but with the right technologies, banks can stay ahead of achieving significant value.