Published: September 21, 2018
Coverage of this year's winners and interviews with the teams.
It’s a real time world after all. This is an appropriate update on the 70s version of a small world, which it is of course amplified by many times since the song was created. Our digital times push us forward into a new age full of challenges and opportunities for industry and indeed for the larger human experiment. Banking has always been positioned somewhere in the middle of all this technological enhancement. Remember how the introduction of the ATM changed banking forever, and how internet banking made waiting in line for the teller a relic of a bygone era.
Today’s real time world has begun. Our winners are already steeped in technological initiatives like blockchain, artificial intelligence and robotics. Embracing business models that never would have been believed just a decade or two earlier are increasingly common place, R3, Hyperledger, Ripple, these consortia are bringing competitors together and partnership is more than just as happy catch phrase, it is the pathway to survival.
More and more our Treasury Services Awards’ winners seek to anticipate their customer’s needs and expectations. There is little doubt that the open banking initiative taking flight in the UK will be coming to a market near you. Add to this the regulators’ efforts to create ‘sandboxes’, level playing fields and access to data for non-banking financial firms and those banks that want to remain competitive must constantly be innovating, investing and integrating third party services that provide ‘bank for the buck’.
Congratulations to this year’s winners, you have demonstrated a flair for customer-service and are working diligently to navigate a fast changing, and exciting future.