Middle East banks embrace digital shift to meet rising consumer demand

Beyond the basic digitalisation of services, banks today are focussing on understanding unique needs of each customer.

With the rise of technology-driven lifestyles, consumers today demand banking services that fit their choices while offering convenience, speed, and personalisation. The Middle East, a region with a burgeoning youth population and high mobile penetration rates, is witnessing a transformative shift in consumer expectations. Customers are no longer content with the mobile app just to check their balance and make payments; instead, they seek digital encounters that match their on-the-go lifestyle. Recognising this, Middle Eastern banks are stepping up, integrating cutting-edge technologies in order to meet these expectations.

Personalisation ++

Beyond the basic digitalisation of services, banks today are focussing on understanding each customer’s unique needs through a combination of behavioural modelling, demographic analysis, spend analysis, and credit analysis. By mapping these data points, banks are able to curate experiences according to customers’ personas.

Modern Digital Engagement Platforms then personalise the customer journey, embedding banking into the very fabric of daily life. Banks in the Middle East today are looking at partnerships with service providers to embed journeys ranging from personal finance management to wealth planners, entertainment, travel, bill payment and even ESG to entice customers. Open Finance plays an integral role in these features. Technology vendors are going the extra mile by providing a country-ready ecosystem, enabling banks to integrate with these service providers through APIs. No code orchestration platforms can help banks design, build, test, secure, manage and retire APIs using one platform. Furthermore, banks can even test complex business flows that span across multiple disparate systems on the fly using an advanced orchestration engine.

Emphasis on operational efficiency

On the RM front, these platforms provide users with a 360° view of their customers’ financial relationships, existing products, pending requests, profitability analysis, and contextual offers in real-time, thereby enabling the RMs to handle a large number of clients and still offer personalized/ contextual advice to each of them.

The Middle Eastern banking scene has also seen the integration of customer-centric features such as Blockchain and Gen AI for enhanced self-service Onboarding in minutes, real-time cross-border payments, comprehensive loan and deposit management, and omnichannel access to facilitate seamless cross-channel experiences.

The architecture driving the paradigm shift

In the background of these advancements lies a robust Microservices & API-based architecture that allows banks to launch new products and services during the financial events in their customers’ lives. Banks can reuse Microservices & APIs across user journeys to reduce the time to market. Since each bank wants to design its UI/UX, we see banks opting for decoupled engagement platforms to design their own user experience using the architecture. User journeys can be designed in a completely no-code manner today, reducing time to market to days. An architecture comprising Events, Microservices, API, Cloud, Headless & AI (eMACH.ai) are most suited to enable banks to evolve continuously and scale up with changing demands.

In conclusion, the Middle East banking sector’s swift response to evolving consumer expectations sets a global benchmark. By integrating modern technologies and centring their efforts around the customer experience, banks are confidently navigating the digital wave. However, like any transformation, banks should create a well-thought-through roadmap for the change. Hence, it is best advisable to invest in a platform that can support evolving customer requirements, regulations, and the bank’s growth plans.

Author:

Rajesh Saxena,

CEO, iGCB, Intellect Design Arena