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BEYOND COVID-19
HOW WILL BANKING
TAKE SHAPE IN THE
‘NEW NORMAL’?

VOXPOP
REPORT
WELCOME

Beyond COVID-19: How will banking take shape in the ‘new normal’?

A ‘Vox Pop Report’ powered by FintechOS 

Disruption has been a buzz word in many industries, including financial services, for some time. In
the old world, innovators were the purveyors of this change. Today’s current environment will have
a dramatic impact both on challenger and incumbent financial institutions alike.
How is the financial industry responding to the global pandemic? How are customer needs being
met? What will be the ‘new normal’ for banking – from a customer-centric point of view – post
COVID-19?
Along with our partner, FintechOS, we aimed to gather a snapshot of views and insights from
senior leaders in our industry to determine how our industry is being shaped during these
unusual times.
Jason Maude
Chief Technology Advocate, Starling Bank

Jason Maude is a coder, coach, and public speaker. He has over a decade of experience working in the financial
sector, primarily in creating and delivering software. He is passionate about explaining complex technical
concepts to those who are convinced that they won’t be able to understand them. He currently works at
Starling Bank as their Chief Technology Advocate and host of the Starling podcast.

What have been the top technology/operational

challenges your organisation has faced since the start
of the pandemic?

Starling is a very different organization so the top technological/operational

challenge was essentially how do we get people comfortable working from home
and that was it. That’s not a unique challenge, right? Starling is not facing that
uniquely that’s a challenge that everyone has faced.

We set up the bank with the idea that it could be run from laptops, and that
those laptops could be anywhere. We might need to run the bank from a café for
example. There was nothing special or magic about the office Wi-Fi, there was
nothing special or magic about where we were located.

The operational challenge of making sure that everyone could work from home was
tough. Some people whose home space was not suitable initially or less suitable for
them or their family. All our challenges have been more human ones.

Now we’re trying to bring some people back into the office, especially those who
deal with customer data. It’s much more secure for them to be in a place with
other people who are also accessing customer data, and in a location, where there
is less chance of someone, who shouldn’t be there, accidentally looking over their
shoulder.

Has the virus accelerated any digital transformation

efforts in your organization, if yes how?

In a word, digital transformation is not a project or a period, like ‘there’s a period of

digital transformation’. At Starling digital transformation is constant. It is always
there, it is always happening.

We set up the bank with the idea
that it could be run from laptops, and
that those laptops could be anywhere.
We might need to run the bank from a
café for example. There was nothing
special or magic about the office Wi-Fi,
there was nothing special or magic
about where we were located.
The way that most organisation understand the phrase ‘digital transformation’
is say: ‘well, we have a load of physical assets, so we have branches, we have
people in the branches talking to other people physically and so on and then we
have physical servers located somewhere which are running code and that sort of
thing we want to try and get rid of all of those by migrating to the cloud moving
people out of branches and moving them online and so on and so on...’
This is the digital transformation.
It is also transforming your old code bases to new code bases so that more modern
applications can be used. It’s a massive project that takes five or ten years and will
definitely be ‘the last one we ever do once we’ve done this digital transformation
we’re finished’, until five or ten years later when another one comes along.
Digital transformation is something that we’re always doing. We started off as
digital, but we’re constantly updating our technology; we’re constantly looking at
things and going: ‘Can we do this in a better way?’

We’re constantly refactoring and reorganizing the code, both to deliver more
products and to deliver products and services more efficiently. Also, to fix bugs
perhaps security holes etc etc … It’s always just constant, constant churn and
turnover.
 Jason Maude Chief Technology Advocate, Starling Bank

How is your organisation supporting customers who

are having a harder time migrating to an all-digital
environment?

This is a trickier question because we’re not trying to migrate customers from a
physical environment onto a digital one. We support customers, or potential new
customers who we want to move from a bank that has physical presence to a bank
that doesn’t have any strict physical presence (Starling has an agreement with the
UK Post Office).

There are several issues. One is making sure our customer service is really good
and making sure that we have 24/7 customer service manned by humans. It
means, you can phone up or chat 24/7 to a human. That helps replace that feeling
of ‘oh it’s all gone online’. We try and make our digital user experience, through
the mobile app and through the online bank as intuitive as possible.

When the main way of interacting, with your bank is through digital you must
make sure that that is good. It must be accessed and used without needing to
ask a load of questions for example. We’re trying to support customers who
are moving from a sort of hybrid space into a purely digital one. In terms of
new customers there was there an uptick in pandemic customers that found
themselves having to be completely online and decided to move to a bank that
was much more in the digital space.

Business customers suddenly found themselves unable to go into bank branches

and found as small medium enterprises the online offerings of most banks were
inadequate for them.

SME banking is behind consumer banking by several years. The reasons for that
are because SME banking is more complicated. It is less easy to migrate things to
online. With SME banking, banks have always depended on, a physical presence.
During COVID, banks started looking around for digital, as businesses started
looking around for banks that offered digital offerings that matched what they
needed. Starling was one of the only ones that delivered this.

Have you accelerated your products to meet customer

needs?
One is making sure our customer
service is really good so making sure
Connected card was one that we accelerated. Connected card was designed as
a feature. You want someone to access your bank account, but you don’t want that we have 24/7 customer service
them to access all of your bank account, you want them to access a small pot of
money within it. Originally, we conceived this like, having a housekeeper, a cleaner. manned by humans. So, you can
Someone who you want to be able to buy cleaning products and you don’t want to phone up or chat 24/7 to a human.
have to go through the rigmarole of having to transfer them the exact amount of
money. You just give them a card and you determine how much they can access on That helps replace that feeling, ‘oh it’s
it. As soon as COVID came along it suddenly took on a new urgency for the larger
number of customers who are stuck at home and cannot go out to the shops to all gone online.
purchase essentials such as food because they, or another member of their family,
is immunocompromised.

At Starling we are very good at adapting to sudden changing circumstances. The

reason for this is that we don’t have projects, so we don’t have project planning or
budget allocation for the next quarter or the next year.

We’re not sitting there saying, ‘Oh God, COVID’s come along we need to go away
and do two days-worth of project planning, and the planning we did at the start
of the year? We need to throw that in the bin and redo it.’

We have optimized our technology process for releasing as fast as we possibly

can. We make sure releasing fast is not incompatible with security and reliability
but is in fact self-reinforcing with it. So that the faster we release, the more
secure and reliable we are, and the more secure and reliable we are the faster we
can release, and so on.

We realized that in order to be taken seriously as a bank, we needed to offer the

bounce-back loans - the business interruption loans, backed by the government.
We can’t be taken seriously as a business bank and not offer these products. We
needed to suddenly put ourselves in a position where we could offer them quickly.
 Jason Maude Chief Technology Advocate, Starling Bank

Post crisis, what services and technology do you think

will be needed when hopefully this is all over?

I don’t think COVID, for the banking industry, has been a complete game
changer. I think that banking was already on a path of digital transformation and
disaggregation. I think that COVID is just going to accelerate that process. The idea
of going to your bank branch once a month to talk to your bank manager has gone
completely out of the window. It’s still common for small and medium enterprises,
to need to go in and talk to the bank now, but that’s only because the technology
isn’t there to support all the things they need to do.

What’s your opinion on this so-called new normal

going forward?

Many banks including us are asking themselves the question, why do we need
an office? What is the purpose of spending huge amounts of money every year
on having a large office in the City or Canary Wharf? We did that so that we could
bring lots of people into this office, but it turns out that they can all work from
home anyway.

COVID has put the accelerator on this process, but ultimately the question is why
do you need to manage your money with another person? For big decisions such
as mortgage and pensions, that’ll stay. But if that’s all that there is, why does
that need to be associated with a particular bank? If I’m not getting my mortgage
from my bank how is my bank, going to make money off me? The reason you get
someone to have a current account is so that you can lend them money in order
to make money from them or sell them premium services. If that’s not happening
because people are buying premium services and mortgages and borrowing money
from elsewhere then why are you offering them a current account? It’s just a loss
for you.

I think that many banks are

asking themselves the question, we
certainly are, why we need an office.
What is the purpose of spending
huge amounts of money every year
on having a large office in the City or
Canary Wharf?
Sohail Raja
UK Chief Digital Officer, Société Générale

Sohail leads the development and management of the Global

Markets Electronic Execution Platform (SG Markets) for sales and
clients across FIs, Corporates, SMEs, Private Banks, IFAs, Brokers
and SG Entities at Société Générale. The course of the last
seven years have driven its transformation from a single-asset
platform into an award-winning, multi-asset solution driven by
business requirements and client needs.

What have been the top technology/operational

challenges your organisation has faced since the start
of the pandemic?

Keeping digital engagement, internally and with clients, as well as keeping

focused and maintaining momentum in a new way of working.

Has the Coronavirus accelerated any digital

transformation efforts in your organisation?
If yes, how?

Yes it has, firstly to re-affirm and leverage the capabilities that were already
in place, and secondly, to focus on actionable information and further improve
process efficiencies based using Dashboard and Workflow capabilities.

How is your organisation supporting customers

who have a harder time migrating to an all-digital
environment?

Most clients have transitioned pretty well and adapted at pace. However, the
nature of the relationships have changed from physical meetings to video and chat
tools, as well as supported with voice!

Most clients have transitioned pretty well

and adapted at pace. However, the nature of
the relationships have changed from physical
meetings to video and chat tools, as well as
supported with voice!
 Sohail Raja UK Chief Digital Officer, Société Générale

Have you accelerated any products to meet customer

needs that rose to the surface because of COVID-19?

Integration strategies and data access areas have been a focus by expanding our
API and Cloud Initiatives.

What are your plans for the post-COVID-19 world?

What new services and technology do you think will
be needed to serve customers, post-crisis?

Mindset and culture have shifted to a more digital engagement, with the ability
to maintain an active customer experience to support the move away from the
traditional approach. However, we still need to try and balance the need for the
more human elements.

We will increase the ability for customers to engage with the bank and third-party
platforms in a Post-COVID-19 world.

Personally, what is your opinion on what the ‘new

normal’ looks like?

Digital engagement will become the primary channel supported by offline

engagement. Needs and requirements will have to be delivered at a faster pace
driven by the need for data and information. The need for service provision will
increase supported with strong offline relationships that support the changing
needs of clients.

Digital engagement will become

the primary channel supported by
offline engagement.
Andrea Melville
MD Commercialisation & Propositions,
GTB, Lloyds Banking Group

Andrea is responsible for Pricing and Balance Sheet

Management; Innovation; Strategic Partnerships; and
Propositions as part of the leadership team Global Transaction
Banking, Commercial Bank, Lloyds Banking Group.

What has been the top technology/operational

challenges your organisation has faced since the start
of the pandemic?

The challenge of the pandemic has impacted everyone in different ways and
adapting to the needs of our clients remains paramount. There has been a rush of
applications for government schemes, working capital solutions and repayment
holidays, and all of these have had an urgency to respond given the criticality of
the situation our clients have faced.

At the same time, we had to respond to these demands in a different way.

Colleagues have been working from home with limited access to paper processes
and therefore ensuring that we had the e-signatures for document signing and the
right, digital processes became necessary across our product suite.

We also had to overcome the challenge of supporting our colleagues remotely. We

had a rapid mobilisation of home working technology on an unprecedented scale,
coming with hardware and software challenges which we have overcome. It was
also key for us to build virtual feedback mechanisms to track colleague wellbeing,
and ensure we were providing support and flexibility where they need it.

Has the Coronavirus accelerated any digital

transformation efforts in your organisation? If yes, how?

Our agile approach to transformation means we are constantly evaluating

initiatives and the value they bring to clients. As part of this, we considered the
impacts of Coronavirus on our priorities to understood which initiatives should be
fast-tracked, or started, and those which we should pause.

Priority went to those which could be implemented quickly and solve for customer
and colleague pain points, mainly paperless solutions that facilitated remote
We have, more than ever, learned working and digital solutions for clients to interact with us. We have, more than
the value of putting simple tools live ever, learned the value of putting simple tools live quickly.

quickly.
 Andrea Melville MD Commercialisation & Propositions, GTB, Lloyds Banking Group

How is your organisation supporting customers

who have a harder time migrating to an all-digital
environment?

We provide human support, including sessions over the phone, to guide customers
how to use our online platforms. This was supported by simplifying our website
content which focused on our online support.

More widely, we have also looked at how the economy and society will be different
after Coronavirus as part of our wider strategy. We have recognised what we
believe are enduring changes, such as an even greater shift from in-store retail to
e-commerce. In this example, we are putting in place solutions to help our clients
engage in these new forms of commerce – not just limited to payment acceptance
but extending into online shopfronts and pre-ordering apps.

Have you accelerated any products to meet customer

needs that rose to the surface because of COVID-19?

CBILS and BBLS have tested (and demonstrated) our ability to launch new
products at speed, and to ensure the right processes are in place to support. It has
also given us learnings on how we can safely short-cut processes in the future.

Key for us has been implementing digital tools which can support clients in
managing their finances throughout recovery and we are currently in pilot with
an accountancy software package and business insights dashboard, aimed at
supporting clients with anticipating pressure points in their cash flow.

Physical face-to-face encounters will be valued more

for what they are and bring. I think people will more
consciously consider when it is beneficial to meet face-
to-face and ensure that these interactions work as best
as possible to extract the value.
 Andrea Melville MD Commercialisation & Propositions, GTB, Lloyds Banking Group

What are your plans for the post-COVID-19 world?

What new services and technology do you think will be
needed to serve customers, post-crisis?

For me, digitisation and automation are key. We knew it was important before, and
its importance has been validated and increased. Whether that’s the increasing
adoption of electronic payment methods such as contactless, increased use of
financial services APIs which remove the need for human intervention in high
frequency processes, or the basic reality of not sending paper materials to
businesses who may not be open to receive those materials, we have to consider
digitisation across all parts of the process.

Personally, what is your opinion on what the ‘new

normal’ looks like?

Whilst the outlook is still evolving, I suspect that physical face-to-face encounters
will be valued more for what they are and bring. I think people will more
consciously consider when it is beneficial to meet face-to-face and ensure they
are able extract as much value as possible when they do.

I also think the new normal will bring a quick shift to omni-channel, digital
experiences, removing precedents of the past such as wet signatures, and be
the catalyst for driving more industry wide initiatives such as digital identity and
Know Your Customer (KYC).

Similarly, I expect that data will become more critical as now, more than ever,
businesses need insights to help them respond to a rapidly changing environment.
Helping business understand their performance and opportunities for growth will
be key.

Finally, partnerships with FinTech’s and other organisations will become even
more central to financial services. We are always learning more about technologies
available to us which can help us adapt, and we have worked with FinTech
throughout the pandemic to help us provide solutions quickly to clients. I think we
will likely see much more of this going forward.
Teodor Blidarus
CEO and Co-Founder of FintechOS

With more than 20 years of experience in the IT&C industry, Teodor started his journey
as the director of the well-known Charisma ERP program, implemented today in more
than 34 countries all over the world. In the last 12 years, he has founded and led
Softelligence and has been working closely with over 100 corporate clients in various
business verticals, with a focus on financial services provided to banks and insurance
companies. In 2017, Teodor launched FintechOS, as a spin-off from Softelligence’s
incubator lab, to help banks and insurance companies to accelerate their digital
transformation.

What have been the top technology/operational

challenges your organisation has faced since the start
of the pandemic?

We’re a tech company and employ tech-savvy people, so the transition to the new
way of working and doing business happened smoothly. We’ve even noticed an
improvement in the past few months – people are more focused, they feel they
have fewer interruptions, they’re more driven, and so on.

So where is the challenge? I’ve noticed one, and it’s likely to grow as the pandemic
crisis lasts longer. People need to meet up to brainstorm, to discuss strategies,
interact with person, exchange positive ideas. Although we’ve adopted various
tools to improve the collaborative side of teamwork, I feel they’re not enough. The
workplace doesn’t build cognitive-only relationships. Working implies socialising,
belonging, feelings. Humans are social beings, after all.

We need to adapt to a new digital social language as never before. And we have
done great so far. Yet the challenge is still there. We’ll need to onboard new
people, new clients, new partners and new suppliers. How do you create a viable
ecosystem with people you’ve never met in person? How do you spark the energy
of the group and nurture a good dynamic among the team?

Has the Coronavirus accelerated any digital

transformation efforts at your organisation? Can you
talk about how?

We’ve even noticed an
improvement in the past few months
- people are more focused, they feel
they have fewer interruptions, they’re
more driven, and so on.
For sure. We’ve had less travel and gained more collaboration online – we saw our
habits flip, virtually overnight. It just started to snowball. The entire ecosystem
moved into the cloud. We saw a larger and faster adoption of our technologies,
both internally and externally.
And this is because FintechOS’s cloud-native technology is designed to enable
organisations to act and react much faster to the new digital reality, as well as
to ensure business continuity. The transformation is both simple and safe for
employees and customers.
In the past few months, we’ve continued to invest in democratising access to
these solutions.
 Teodor Blidarus CEO and Co-Founder of FintechOS

How is your organisation supporting customers

who have a harder time migrating to an all-digital
environment?

Digital personalisation is at the core of our solutions, so we tried to adapt the

teams and our Customer Success methodologies in such a way that we could meet
the demands of different markets, clients and industries – and deliver the support
our customers needed at speed.

We’ve made massive investments this year to double the customer success team
and we’ve successfully met increasing demands from our customers.

Have you accelerated any products to meet customer

needs that rose to the surface because of COVID-19?

Absolutely. We made investments into two major areas. Firstly, we made sure that
a reliable platform for a digital workplace was put in place – with video advisory,
digital onboarding capabilities, co-browsing and so on. Our aim was to bring
customers, banks and insurers together in a digital collaborative space.

Secondly, we redesigned and re-engineered our technology to empower our

customers to easily roll out end-to-end digital customer journeys with unparalleled
speed to market, to enhance digital engagement, and to meet clients’ changing
needs. This meant we increased investments in ready-made solutions for digital
onboarding, digital lending, digital insurance, digital savings and so on.

In short, we made it as easy as possible to offer our customers plug-and-play

solutions for their business continuity.

Thanks to these investments, we saw an uptick in the adoption of our technology

in Asia and the USA. Financial products that can engage with customers at scale
on a highly personalised, yet automated basis, was really good for us.

Firstly, we made sure that

a reliable platform for a digital
workplace was put in place.
 Teodor Blidarus CEO and Co-Founder of FintechOS

What is the plan for the post-COVID-19 world? What

services and technology will be needed to serve
customers, post-crisis?

The precise impact of COVID-19 is yet to unfold, but I think that in a post-
Covid-19 world, personalised and flexible product features will remain the top
differentiators in driving a purchase. Let’s take a look at the insurance industry.
When governments across the world put a halt to face-to-face meetings, the sales
on traditional channels – i.e. brokers, agents, branches – collapsed.

If we imagine a post-crisis scenario, I think leading banks and insurers will want
to be equipped with ready-to-go solutions that cut time-to-market, are easy to
deploy, and that require no code/low code. Our plan is that this new reality will
find FintechOS in pole-position in each strategic market, ready to provide financial
services organisations with solutions very well suited to the challenges and
opportunities of the next decade. We also plan to grow Customer Success teams
in our main markets, to find new ways of engaging with customers, banks and
insurers.

Personally, what is your opinion on what the ‘new

normal’ looks like?

Some of the COVID-19-induced shifts in customer behaviour are temporary, purely

based on coping with the crisis, but other, more fundamental changes are here to
stay. How are we working now? About 70% of us work remotely. I don’t see how
we will get back to a 100% presence at the office.

Secondly, we will see a change in the way people interact socially and how they
build trust. In Asia, trust is built face to face, it is a cultural thing. How will these
cultures change overnight?

I predict that it won’t be enough to digitise everything and automate interaction.

For example how will people build trust by surfing oceans of data and algorithms?

Maybe we’ll have to build something new to fill this gap in a world where digital
self-servicing will dominate. Automation is the buzzword when we talk about
the future, that’s true. But I don’t think that’s enough. We’ll need to approach
automation in a hyper-personalised nuanced way so that we get all the benefits of
increased efficiency without losing out on the most important factor – the human
touch.

About 70% of us work remotely... I don’t see how we

will get back to a 100% presence at the office.
 Ioana Serban
Marketing Director
FINTECHOS
Tel: +44 20 3983 6363
Email: ioana.serban@fintechos.com
Website: www.fintechos.com

Liz Lumley
Director
VC INNOVATIONS
Tel: +44 (0) 7711 554654
Email: liz.lumley@vcinnovations.co.uk
Website: www.vcinnovations.co.uk

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