Sunday, August 30, 2015

Banking Innovation: What's the Same, What's Different, In the Developed and Developing World

If there wasn't enough focus on it already, how do i get a paypal account in Bangladesh. crisis has taken innovation to the top of most banks' agendas. In mature as well as emerging markets, banking institutions are differentiating their value proposition from that of their competitors by innovating upon their offerings, benefiting both customers and the organization in the process.
The pursuit of globalization and global standardization by banks has meant that innovations that originate in a particular region make their way quickly across the world, so that banking customers everywhere enjoy a similar, if not the same, usage experience.
That being said, there are many differences in the way that banks from the developed and developing worlds innovate, arising from other fundamental differences in their respective markets. The nature of these factors and their causative impact on innovation differentiation is discussed below:
Market Maturity
A research report presented by The Asian Banker and Finacle from Infosys on the innovation trends and practices in Asia made an interesting observation about how banks go through successive stages of innovation - from Product to Sales to Market Share to Customer Service Innovation - depending on market maturity. Therefore, while banks in Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Vietnam, and rural China and India, which have large unbanked segments focus on introducing basic products, their counterparts in the competitive Australian, Singapore and Hong Kong Markets are more intent on defending their market share by providing accessibility, convenience and cheaper distribution.
Customer Universe
Given the high penetration of banking services amongst developed nations, a bank operating in those markets can only grow its market share at the cost of another. On the other hand, developing countries house the majority of the 2 billion-strong global unbanked population and hence have more room for growth and relatively less aggressive competition. Here, banks can grow along with the market by bringing those without financial access into the net of basic banking services.
Although financial inclusion is a much larger priority - and opportunity for innovation - in emerging economies, it does not mean that it has no place in mature markets. In fact, the U.S. alone was estimated to have over 70 million unbanked/underbanked people in 2009. However, the nature of the problem is quite different there. Financial exclusion in the developing world is essentially on account of poor branch penetration in rural or remote areas, whereas in developed countries it is quite often, a voluntary decision or the result of inability to meet KYC norms - the Hispanic immigrants living in the United States are a classic example of this phenomenon, choosing to rely on informal networks or carriers rather than on a bank to send money home.
High Net Worth Segment
In every banking market around the world, High Net Worth Individuals (HNWI) are top-drawer. Because the financial elite come in small stable numbers, (even in 2020, the U.S., which has the most HNWI, will have less than 21 million millionaire households) acquiring such customers in both developing and developed markets is usually a matter of poaching them from rival banks. Also, since the ultra-rich are the same everywhere, having similar needs, wealth managers and private bankers in both the developed and developing world follow a largely similar approach while serving these customers. A key difference however, is that the HNWI segment is growing faster in emerging markets thanks to their rising prosperity as a result of which their mass affluent are turning rich and the already rich are turning richer quicker than their mature market counterparts. This is creating more opportunities for innovation in emerging nations. how do i get a paypal account in Bangladesh.