Bank 4.0: Banking Everywhere, Never at a Bank

by Brett King

The Bank 4.0 “digitisation” scorecard If you want to know how close you are to becoming a Bank 4.0 player, use the questions below to score yourself: First principles is your mantra—Your organisation doesn’t work off conventional wisdom, doesn’t iterate off the analogy of the existing banking business. Frankly, you’re prepared to burn it all to the ground and start again, because you realise the way banking works today based on a system that is 700 years old isn’t the way it’s going to work 20 years from now. You are excited to reimagine banking from scratch. Any traditional operations are there to provide enough profit or working capital to transform into a Bank 4.0 future. You are willing to sacrifice quarterly returns to support a new innovation initiative, and you’ve convinced your board to get on board. If you’ve ever pulled budget from a new digital initiative so you can make your quarterly numbers, you aren’t a digital bank. If you have ever heard someone in the executive team use the phrase “that’s not how we do banking” or similar—you aren’t a 4.0 bank. A digital CEO—Either a technology geek who has risen through the ranks to be a CEO, or a CEO who has had a “come to Jesus/FinTech” moment and has told the entire bank their mission is to be digital, and can speak with authority on technologies like AI and voice. If your CEO hasn’t given your business a mission to be a digital player, you won’t transition to Bank 4.0. Digital is not a department, channel or separate...