Innovation in Digital Banking Awards 2020

Congratulations to the winners of the Innovation in Digital Banking Awards 2020 – all have illustrated the art of the possible in digital banking.

Undoubtedly 2020 has been a year of great change, as millions of employees and customers around the world had to make a dramatic shift from the office to home working, and commerce has been driven even further into the digital realm. Many have commented that new things – whether products, services or ways of working – that would have taken months or years to implement under normal circumstances, or even regarded as impossible, were realised in days or weeks due to pressing necessity.

During the rapid restructuring of everyday life, it has become obvious that the resources that banks across the globe have invested in digitally transforming their businesses from top to bottom over the past decade has paid off during the Covid-19 crisis. Impressively, most of the submissions for this year’s awards included new products and services aimed at responding to client needs – whether retail customers, small and medium-sized enterprises, corporates or institutions – during the global lockdown.

And while we can’t claim to have had a premonition, The Banker team did exhibit some foresight at the beginning of the year when we decided to rename our popular Tech Projects Awards to the Innovation in Digital Banking Awards, which we thought better reflected what was happening across the industry. After years of the digital transformation category receiving the most entries from across the world, we were keen to dig deeper into developments and innovations happening on a regional level – as well as reward regional pioneers.

What has become clear over the years is that enterprise digital transformation is not a piecemeal endeavour – it is a wholesale and fundamental shift in mindset, as well as technology. And those institutions that are truly innovative and want to stay competitive in the future have been transforming their workforce as well as their tech stack.

We did, however, retain a few of the most popular project categories, including artificial intelligence/robotics, mobile channel and payments, which always garnered a sizeable volume of submissions in previous years. We also kept the fintech partnership category and added another for technology joint ventures.

One observable trend is that most submissions, even in specific project categories, have broken down the technology silos and combined many emerging technologies, such as artificial intelligence, blockchain and smart contracts, data analytics and open application programming interfaces. Cloud technology is underpinning the exponential explosion in innovation – which is nothing new for fintechs, but it is beginning to permeate all areas of the incumbent banks, which are starting to reap the efficiency and reduced time-to-market rewards.

Collaboration is another dominant theme, with most submissions listing both big tech and fintech partners. In-house development is still happening, but many banks are leveraging the power of multiple best-in-class fintech solutions that can be quickly tailored to their needs.

We would like to take this opportunity to thank our independent panel of judges for their enthusiasm and indefatigable efforts. It’s a tough job and we appreciate your diligence.