banking

After a few quiet years, Thought Machine, the fintech behind a new core banking platform called Vault, is stealing the limelight, first with its announcement of a strategic partnership with Lloyds Banking Group, then with a similar partnership with the digital bank Atom. And today we’ve learned about another partnership, this time with IBM. We […]

In the decade since the global financial crisis, much of the financial services industry has made a strong recovery. While many governments are still nursing large debts, most banks, investment management firms, and insurance companies have long since returned to good health. Growing economies, rising interest rates, and increased trading activity have delivered strong earnings […]

Digital banks are not eating the incumbent banks’ lunch (yet!), but they’re certainly demonstrating voracious appetite. In the UK, Monzo recently hit the one-million-customer mark, while Revolut has almost tripled its customers to 2.8 million in a year. Lifestyle app Alipay, the digital wallet and payments solution operated by Ant Financial, now has 700 million […]

Financial services firms are on the hunt. They’re hunting unicorns. As firms like Revolut and TransferWise attain valuations of $1 billion or more, the pressure to find the Stripes of this world before their value skyrockets has never been stronger. But it’s not just the unicorns that firms are hunting. They’re also chasing the wolpertinger. […]

Forrester’s 2018 Customer Experience Index (CX Index™) results continue to show that companies are struggling to create and sustain a human connection with their customers. This is not a question of delighting customers as an endgame or some fluffy sense of emotional attachment; this is a crass and clear story of financial risk. Taking a step […]

Customer experience leaders grow revenue faster than CX laggards, drive higher brand preference, and can charge more for their products. Based on a survey of more than 110,000 US adult customers in 2018, Forrester’s Customer Experience Index (CX Index™) methodology measures how well a brand’s customer experience strengthens the loyalty of its customers so that […]

Take another not-so-random walk with me, this time as my colleague Peter Wannemacher and I explore what makes USAA a standout performer in our Mobile Banking Benchmark assessment. As we did before when exploring The Home Depot’s success in our “The Forrester Retail Wave: US Mobile Web, Q4 2017” report, we invited executives from USAA […]

Back in 2009, Forrester launched its first customer experience forum. We picked New York as the location because for years we’d put on a financial services event there, and we knew that our attendees from the banking, brokerage, and insurance industries all had CX on their minds. We didn’t know how well the new event […]

TL;DR: It has been a slow, fragmented start to open banking, but the pace will accelerate. Fintechs are forging ahead with innovation, and a new set of intermediary service providers is growing. Banks need to become outside-in fast to thrive with open banking, building operating model competence for an externally oriented business. Few Banks Place […]

With the latest change to the BofA online banking bill pay service (which added all sorts of unnecessary and distracting icons and ugly fonts), the bank decided to remove the one-time password two-factor authentication (OTP 2FA) requirement to force the customer to perform a one-time password-based step-up authentication before allowing the change. Instead, by default, […]

Like a football team captain at a junior high dance, Amazon just sauntered up to a big group of people and started dropping hints about its sweet moves on the dance floor . . . Okay, that’s not exactly what’s happening here, but it sure felt like that to many bank executives who heard the […]

AI, blockchain, chatbot, digital identity, etc. — there’s enough emerging technology in financial services to fill a whole alphabet book. And it’s difficult not to get swept off your feet by visions of bionic men, self-executing smart contracts, and virtual assistants that anticipate our every need. Investing in emerging technology is one of the main […]

Having trekked between the ExCel convention center and central London for most of last week – Finovate Europe moved to this larger and more remote location from the historical Old Billingsgate Hall this year – I can’t help but think that the changed location and format of the event reflect the wider changes happening in […]

Online banking is currently the most frequently used banking touchpoint in Europe, with 70% of European online adults now using online banking on a desktop or laptop at least once a month.[i] Most people use online banking for routine tasks such as checking their transaction history, transferring money between accounts, and paying bills. But online […]

In this year’s Customer Experience Index, Forrester ranked and measured CX quality of 28 US direct and traditional retail banks brands. The research is based on Forrester’s CX Index methodology, which measures how well a brand’s CX strengthens the loyalty of its customers. After analyzing the new data, we found that two stalwarts of CX […]