Speaking to RBI, Chris Kronenthal, President and CTO at FreedomPay, analyses some of the likely tech trends in retail banking for 2020

Go deeper with GlobalData

Data Insights

The gold standard of business intelligence.

Find out more

There’s no denying that today’s consumers are more tech-savvy than ever before.  But while enterprises continue to roll-out sleek apps and digitally-enabled tools for their businesses to meet their customers’ needs, far too much of this innovation has been aimed at front-end functionality, while much of the critical back-end processes are sitting on complex, legacy tech systems.

Businesses of all sizes need to assess their entire end-to-end technology platforms if they want to stay ahead. In this dynamic world, customer and operational data is vital to secure. And, for the inherent value to be truly unlocked, it must flow freely across the hospitality value chain providing connected insight across channels, functions and locations.

Avoiding fragmentation is one of the key challenges many consumer-facing industries will need to solve in 2020. We are not talking about ripping and replacing  digital infrastructure as the cost would be monumental, if not entirely impossible, but surround and expanding legacy systems to stay competitive.

With the right digital architecture, businesses can not only ensure they are prepared for the future, but they can also solve another key challenge: customer data.

Many businesses still have issues analysing, managing and understanding their customer’s data. Turning data into profit is a challenge, but there are solutions on the market that can deliver real-time customer and business intelligence, to allow businesses to analyse consumer habits, purchasing trends and fine-tune the services they provide.

The key is to ensure that you have the right commerce platform that can work collaboratively within the hospitality eco-system alongside IT teams, operations, marketing and finance.

Those businesses that have implemented a plan to solve the data and digital infrastructure challenges will inevitably be the ones that see the most success in 2020 and beyond.