Banking's competitive landscape - what can smaller banks do to thrive?

With competition emanating not only from fintechs but also leading technology companies, it has become extremely difficult to grow or even maintain margins. The business focus has evolved from products to channels to customer to enhanced experience and self-service models – this has become crucial with the ongoing pandemic that will continue to drive and shape business models.   

The low interest regime has further put pressure on what a bank can do on the pricing strategy for their customer base making it challenging on differentiating products and at the risk of replication by competition.   

“Banks need to continuously review their systems and technologies, be more agile and create an ecosystem to be responsive to customer needs to keep ahead with competitors,” commented Ranjan Kumar, Product Owner, Digital Banking at Sandstone Technology.  

In this highly competitive open banking landscape, it’s imperative for lower tier banks to sustain their customer base. They need to have a strategy in place to modernise their core systems or develop a banking ecosystem, where they can easily offer a multitude of products and services to their customers. This can also enable them in market expansion and growing their customer base. These banks can look at specialist providers for their digital front-end and define their journey towards a digital core, either adopting a digital core solution or working with their core providers to enable incremental changes that can enable flexibility and agility.  

To read Sandstone Technology’s full article Banking’s competitive landscape – what smaller banks can do to thrive  please visit  https://www.sandstone.com.au/en-au/article/bankings-competitive-landscape