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The arrival of Money20/20 in Copenhagen brought a breath of fresh air to the European conference circuit. The high-energy, well-structured event generated a bright atmosphere for conversation and collaboration – and not just because business in the networking area was conducted in colourful sheds. Notable by their absence were customers, but industry players were out in force and a recurring topic of conversation was how today’s banks and financial institutions can add immediacy to their processes.

The fact that customers have taken to services like Amazon 1-Click, Twitter and Alipay suggests that immediacy is what they want.

To deliver it, banks and FIs need to be digital and online. That’s a minimum, but it isn’t enough. They also need decision-making that supports immediacy. Manual, complex risk analytics and decisioning is clunky and slow. Automated, streamlined processes returning a rapid ‘yes’ or an immediate ‘no’ credit or loan decision are what’s needed.

People share information online constantly; and it’s resulted in new forms of data. The complete view of a prospective customer no longer resides only in bank statements and spreadsheets. It’s also in online reviews and online behaviour.

If a consumer wants to know if a company is reliable and provides value for money, they’ll look at review sites and read what people have written about them on Twitter. Why wouldn’t the same information form part of risk decisions taken by finance and payments providers?

Inspiring speakers at the event included BBVA’s CEO Carlos Torres Vila and Sebastian Siemiatkowski, CEO and co-founder of innovative e-commerce company Klarna, which is changing the way people pay for goods online. Ricky Knox, co-founder of digital-only bank Tandem talked about how their approach is reimagining the bank as we know it.

It was a successful start in Europe for the Money 20/20 brand. We look forward to October and Las Vegas.

Learn how Klarna was able to increase agility with credit risk analytics.

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Money20/20 Europe next month promises to be an inspiring few days of discussion, debate, information sharing and collaboration. With evolving regulation, rising customer expectations and increasing levels of competition, the financial services and payments industry is a challenging one to be in; but innovators are meeting these challenges through some exciting trends. I’m expecting to hear about:

1. The route to easy mobile payments 

Online and mobile shopping ushered in a whole new era of commerce. As options for single click-to-buy make shopping even more convenient, so lengthy checkout processes that demand a raft of personal and payment details become an even greater obstacle. Online shopping cart abandonment is a problem for retailers and merchants. Central to addressing it, are simple, quick, secure and convenient payment processes incorporating risk analytics for rapid credit decisioning. E-commerce company Klarna takes friction out of the online buying process to help ease the way to a higher rate of purchase completion. Klarna separates the buying from the paying, making a rapid risk analytics decision on every transaction so shoppers need input only basic personal information and can choose to make payment after goods have been received.

2. Meeting the SME lending need

The British Bankers Association has reported that net lending to SMEs of £2.1bn last year was the first annual rise since 2011. However, total loan facilities approved in 2015 saw a 12 per cent decrease compared to 2014.

Meanwhile, the newer breed of funding providers continue to gain ground. For all financial institutions fintech offers a way to bridge the SME lending gap, providing compelling benefits that include automation, more staff resources to focus on customers rather than process and data for advanced analytics.

3. The age of data

In today’s digital age, would-be borrowers generate huge quantities of behavioural and lifestyle data online that can provide indicators of creditworthiness and ability to repay. This data can be useful to credit risk scorers, complementing established data sources and possibly providing an alternative route to a credit decision. Innovations in credit risk analytics can be instrumental in reaching the underbanked who may have struggled to secure funding in the past.

4. The digital transformation trend

Customers won’t wait days for a credit or loan decision anymore. Rapid decisions and transactions are the expectation for a real-time experience. This is unachievable for financial institutions tied-up by complex, resource-intensive processes. Manual processes and silos in the workstream are obstacles to the fast and efficient sharing of information. Addressing this requires a digital transformation of systems and processes. It’s a far-reaching, challenging exercise but through it, automation can increase productivity, reduce costs and improve customer service. Information held and processed digitally also provides greater traceability through a real-time status view across business functions. Not only does this improve operational efficiency, scalability and business insight but also helps with regulatory compliance.

5. Success through collaboration 

Fintech provides exciting opportunities for financial institutions faced with expensive, resource-intensive regulatory and risk management obligations. Through collaboration with technology partners, credit and loan providers can cut through patchworks of legacy systems, business process silos and labour-intensive manual processes. Success in a vendor partnership lies in its ability to fulfil integration needs – seamlessly integrating risk analytics and decisioning solutions with data sources and customer relationship management tools, and a single solution to meet the needs of all business lines. In an ever-changing market, flexibility is paramount, as is the expertise and capability to adapt to meet evolving regulatory requirements.