• Kasper Sylvest, Senior Financial Market Infrastructure Manager at Danske Bank


• 02.06.2016 12:00 pm

Kasper Sylvest is delivering a speaker session and contributing to a panel debate titled ‘User engagement assessing what they want and what they need from a bank’ and ‘International lessons: how have regulators around the world helped or hindered payments’ respectively, as part of PayExpo Europe, taking place 7 & 8 June at London’s ExCeL.

1. What are your views on digital financial services within the current traditional banking apparatus?

I think that we (the traditional banks) have for a long time taken the ‘inside-out’ perspective and designed our services and offerings without putting the costumer in the center.

1. How are conventional banks innovating for the future of payments? How do they keep pace with more agile ‘challenger’ banks?

Most of them don’t. We are somewhat hindered by our legacy infrastructure so what we see is mostly ‘standalone’ initiatives with only little integration into the ‘classic’ bank. These are usually short sighted solutions but that is ok if the bank at the same time upgrade their legacy platform so it eventually can become agile.

1. Please give some examples of existing and future consumer needs vs current wants. How do banks address them?

First of all consumers wants simplicity and convenience. One example of this are the P2P mobile payment solutions that are replacing cash. Usually (in the Nordics) people don’t carry cash anymore so it is convenient to just use the phone instead of first withdrawing cash from an ATM and then you physically have to be near the receiver in order to give the cash. That is much more convenient with a phone as it works remotely. At the same time using a proxy such as the mobile number instead of the bank account number makes it much more simple. So that is one example of what banks (and others) do to fulfill customer needs. In the future we will move more and more into digital assistants who can help the consumer making the right decisions.

1. How do you balance the needs of consumers with existing architecture? Are wholesale changes needed?

Naturally we cannot do everything in our legacy infrastructure so we do a combination of quick wins and ‘something on the side’. We will see more integrated wholesale solutions in the future once banks architecture have been upgraded.

1. Please give some examples of the metrics that you use to assess customer behaviour? At what point do you adjust?

Difficult to give a simple answer here as there are so many different scenarios and tools. We use focus groups, Facebook polls, system usage statistics etc.

1. What do you see as the future of payments in banking? What is the most likely iteration?

A payment is a necessary evil, not something you want to do but something you have to so they are not going away. What we will see as a result of the Open Banking initiative and the revised Payment Service Directive (PSD2) is a battle between banks and third party providers on who can deliver the best dashboard / user interface. This can be general solutions (like e- and m-banking) or solutions designed for specific use cases.

For more information please visit: www.payexpo.com/europe