Technological Thoughts by Jerome Kehrli

A few weeks ago, I did a speech about the Digitalization and its impact on financial institutions, both in terms of challenges and opportunities in the context of my role as Head of R&D in my current company.
I am reporting here my speech as an article.

Even though the Digitalization and its impacts is something so widely discussed and studied nowadays, even in banking institutions, I still find it puzzling that so many of them struggle following the pace.
Having said that, many others on the other hand have well understood how much technology is about to disrupt the banking business just as Uber has disrupted the transportation business and AirBnB the lodging business and many good and enlightening initiatives start to flourish in the news.

But still, it seems to me that most innovations in banking are really coming from small players or even startups - think of fintechs - instead of coming from the big players of the banking industry. For instance, paying everything with a cellphone is a thing for a few years now in many African countries while it's not at all in Europe, even in Switzerland, THE country of banking.
Especially in Switzerland, financial institutions struggle keeping up with evolution of their business coming from the digitalization on one side and the regulatory pressure as well as the reduction of the margins on the other side.
Discussing this very matter further exceeds the scope of this article of course but I want to report below my speech notes and present what I see as the most important challenges and opportunities for the banking industry coming from the digitalization.