Bryn Barlow

Wavestone surveyed 200 senior IT leaders across the UK's largest organisations and found 79% reporting strong or very strong business demand for AI. The same study found that 70% have not fully implemented the operating models needed to deliver on it. The gap is not between AI believers and sceptics — it's between ambition and execution infrastructure.

By Bryn Barlow, Partner, ISG. In recent years, traditional banks have faced new competition from challenger banks, FinTech start-ups and Big Tech companies moving into the banking sector – and if you’re in Asia, all of these combined as new ecosystems and platform-based networks like Ant and Tencent evolve. They’ve had to adapt to compete with more agile challengers – businesses free of legacy systems and processes, which innovate and have a different risk appetite.

At the outset of 2020, nobody in the banking industry could have predicted the chain of events that would unfurl. But it hasn’t all been doom and gloom – this year has seen unparalleled technological advancement that will undoubtedly benefit both banks’ internal operations and their customers. But will this momentum continue over the next twelve months and what will the long-term ramifications of the pandemic be?