Publicis.Sapient Supports Lloyds Banking Group Towards an Open Banking Future

The era of open banking has arrived, with the CMA/PSD2 driven initiative going live on 13 January 2018, further accelerating the digital business transformation occurring within the financial services ecosystem. Banks will now expose APIs for their products, their customers’ accounts to enable data sharing and allow payment initiation by trusted third parties (TPPs). The CMA/PSD2 compliance deadline in the UK represents the beginning of financial services evolution that is also being driven by changing customer expectations.

Publicis.Sapient, the world’s most advanced digital transformation company, has supported numerous clients in preparation for the open future, including Lloyds Banking Group in the UK.

“The open banking remedies have the potential to be game changers. The challenge for everyone will be to understand what customers want: the more customer-centric they are, the more likely they are to succeed,” commented Bill Roberts, Assistant director, Remedies, Business and Financial Analysis, Competition and Markets Authority (CMA).

Publicis.Sapient believes that the new era of open banking will radically alter the bank and the relationship with its customers, opening up new opportunities and forcing new forms of collaboration. However, it also creates significant challenges for incumbent players across five core areas: Technology and infrastructure, including APIs; the data it holds, securing it and the third party sources it incorporates to augment client insights; service design and delivery; the tone, content, and mechanisms for marketing and communication to clients, and; the bank brand.

“Consumer and business expectations for traditional financial services providers are being shaped by their experiences in other sectors: instant, highly personalized services that fit the way they live. The shift from ‘Bank First’ to ‘Life First’, from product push to customer-centric experiences where clients own their data, will require banks to act in very different ways.

“This requires a special partner such as Publicis.Sapient, specifically designed for this new type of transformation, with an emotional understanding and a value system built on an unyielding drive to create impact for our clients’ customers and colleagues,” said David Murphy, senior vice president and FS EMEA lead at Publicis.Sapient.

The open future will see banks contend with a new breed of competitor built for a connected age that has a different level of trust and engagement. This includes neo-banks, the tech titans, as well as large-scale data players such as energy providers, retailers and Telcos.