Futureproofing post-pandemic payments

When 2020 demanded overnight digital transformation, Chief Information Officers (CIOs) and Chief Technology Officers (CTOs), found themselves taking a place centre stage. Tech teams were suddenly responsible for bringing businesses up to date, online, and into the Cloud so they could continue to serve their customers effectively during the unforeseen crisis. 

In July 2021 we spoke to CTOs and CIOs at Banks, FinTechs, and Payments businesses across the UK, DACH, and Benelux to find out how they were emerging from these challenges. What our research found was that the life of a CIO or CTO would be far simpler and less stressful if these expert decision-makers were able to implement the necessary changes and technology simply, quickly, and cost-effectively. However, a multitude of internal and external obstacles combine to hold them back from achieving many of their goals.

Customer centricity challenges

More than 99% of respondents feel progress is hindered by at least one internal and/or external challenge. The biggest internal challenge that stands in the way of half (49%) of respondents is the lack of integration with customer-facing departments. Only slightly fewer (45%) cited a lack of data consistency between internal systems and a lack of consistency across countries' operations (44.5%).

Looking outward, the most common of the external challenges across all respondents was the inconsistency of regulations across geographies. Overall, external challenges featured most frequently in CTOs’ and CIOs’ top concerns were: inconsistent regulation across geographies (30%), money laundering risk (30%), recession (29%), and skills gaps (29%).

As many Financial Institutions are coming to realise, partnerships with expert external providers could help resolve many of these issues without the significant investment of internal overhaul.

To discover more of the survey findings, download the white paper: Futureproofing Payments Tech: The challenges facing CIOs and CTOs