From payments to supply chain, transaction banks are facing increasingly fierce competition from both traditional and non-traditional players. Third-party platforms, treasury management solutions, and global financial messaging providers like SWIFT are providing connections and access channels to different institutions in creative and cost-effective ways. The Frictionless track of The Future of Finance Summit provides a platform senior practitioners in financial institutions, correspondent banking and transaction banking businesses to catch up with the latest developments whilst learning about new trends and identifying ways to progress their institutions to the next level. The first session started on “The Effects of the Return of Cash and Liquidity on the strategies of financial institutions in a Rising Rate Environment – how are financial institutions likely to behave”. Pransanth Mathew, director of Deutsche Bank APAC cash management corporate & trade finance, said that many tech companies fund supply financing programs because that offer the best bank for their liquidity that was lying around, as opposed to putting it in a structured deposit or investment option. Some equation parameters change a little bit in the rising interest rate environment. Adinata Widia, group head of Bank Mandiri transaction banking department, mentioned that in such an environment, it is almost impossible for small banks with a small margin to survive. James Cullen moderated this session. The second session was about “The Missing Financial Link in the Digital Transformation of the Corporate Business – Following the Supply Chain”. Damian Glendinning, president of Association of Corporate Treasurers (Singapore), believed that banks are generally slow to take up the digital transformation and these changes could result in the situation that some main bank businesses will go to other people, payments in particular. David Chance, SVP of Dovetail product strategy Department, said: “We will not only be talking about payments in three, or four years’ time but will talk about the entire end-to-end interactions of the service, the goods, the interaction models, etc.” Bill Chua and Matt Dooley co-moderated this session. The third session was on “Real-time payments go global – going beyond cross border settlement and integration with digital businesses”. In this session, Constantin Robertz, MD of Zalora Philippines suggested that: “Real-time payments are the basis which make ecommerce mainstream. If we look at China, the real rise of ecommerce coincide with the rise of ecommerce payment methods.” ES Venkat, APAC head from treasury product management of bank of America, added that “banks, especially global ones see tech companies coming into the financial space and try to accelerate the transformation. Real-time payments become an important initiative for traditional banks and they are trying to make it happen in a faster pace.” Richard Hartung moderated the session. In day two there were three sessions in the Frictionless track. The first session on day two was on “Making Cross-Border Payments more Seamless and Frictionless”. Jan Luebke, head of market management Asia, institutional cash management, Deutsche Bank made a comparison between payments and express delivery. He mentioned: “DHL transport packages from A to B. At any given stage, consumers know where their packages are. We transport payments and transactions of much greater value but have no clue where it is. Consumers are looking for that DHL experience knowing where their payment is at any given stage.” Raymond Leung, group chief operating officer of Alliance Bank Malaysia, said: “It is a big challenge for banks to cope with costs and changes with infrastructure to support cross-border payments.” James Cullen moderated the session. The second session was a panel discussion on “Deploy or Die – From the Innovation Labs into Your Customer Delivery Infrastructure”. Mark Englehart, SVP of DBS innovation management department, mentioned that: “DBS Innovation Lab is just a part of a wider strategy transforming the culture from traditional to customer-centric way of doing business. Existing bankers could have exposures and experiences with new ways of problem-solving here and bring those to their business throughout the bank.” Matt Dooley moderated the session. The last session was about “Our Journey from Data to Products to Deeper Engagement”. Dariusz Trocyszyn, consultant of Comarch corporate banking department made a presentation on this topic. In the presentation, he mentioned: “Companies want to have all products now, but banks with huge silos, different departments, different branches, etc. do not work like that. Without the support of technology, it is hard to gather information effectively together.” Stephanie Myers, VP of customer strategy, experience and loyalty at Prudential Assurance said Prudential in Singapore is trying to bring in people with different skillsets to achieve a customer-centric and digitally-enabled organisation. James Cullen chaired this session.
