Are Banks Still Taking a Traditional View Toward Branch Technology?

New technologies by the FINTECH community continue to grab the spotlight in the market. FINTECH is pushing hard on digital payment varieties and all kinds of scenarios to make P2P, B2B, and P2B via mobile devices and new card/chips options, taking volume from the branches. Banks are looking for ways to better serve millennials, too.

As “new banking technologies” become more and more pervasive and comfortable for the public at large, the retail bank space has to stay on top of the mechanisms that will allow seamless service across all platforms.

Chart: Aite Group

The Aite Group’s comprehensive report uses survey responses from 22 banks on their views toward retail banking solutions moving forward. This Impact Report describes retail banking executives’ views of how branch technology is evolving, and it makes recommendations for financial institutions and vendors participating in the branch technology market.

Do these numbers suggest banks are back to looking at technology with a conservative eye? Infrastructure is important, but prioritizing teller and platform systems tells us something, no? Is branch transformation taking a twist to optimize the sales staff over a self service model? It might seem so.

We don’t see any surprises here. We know video banking and kiosk deployment is slower than optimistic, pre-market adoption predictions. Banks are still updating teller platforms and doing their best to adoption new technologies to enable tellers to cross-sell, automate transactions and validate the negotiability of the transactions to minimize risk. That bread-and-butter approach might just be the path of least resistance which appeals most to banks.