Banking is All Digital

During Combis conference, at the panel discussion "Digital era in the financial industry", Ivan Maglić from Gartner Adriatic/Calisto, also the moderator of the panel discussion, pointed out at the very beginning that the digital transformation of banks went through three evolutionary phases. The first phase created electronical money, then followed phase of transition from analog to digital business processes and the introduction of online banking. In the third phrase, through the powerful digital business model, it connected systems and people, places and things, and with the help of technology was able to encourage changes.

"In the EU, of the total number of all types of financial transactions, over 90 percent is still done in cash (volume is of course much smaller, only 8 per cent). Germans have calculated precisely that the cash flow of a taxpayer costs them 150 euros a year. This fact should open the eyes of everyone from state institutions, regulators, financial service providers, retailers and consumers, to the fact that it is high time for the digital transformation", said Igor Strejček, director of Digital Channels Erste Bank.

Mobile technology is more favorable and more accessible than ever, and by 2018 the EU regulations will open the gates to all interested providers of digital financial services to easily connect to existing financial institutions, Strejček pointed out.

Vesna Valić, director of IT Raiffeisenbank Austria pointed out that they understand and practice the digitization of banking far beyond the interactions with customers and service offerings. "We continuously improve and transform background processes with the aim of achieving greater efficiency and quality. I believe that the ultimate success of digitization depends on the quality of the business model and the organizational culture. For this reason, we are working intensively to identify changes in thinking and behavior of people within the organization and jointly find ways to overcome the challenges that lie ahead in the context of digitization outside the organization, i.e. to customers and within the organization in terms of process optimization, innovative ways of work, systematization and sharing of know-how and best practices and more flexible organizational structure," said Valić.

"A major step forward done by Zagrebačka banka this July was the introduction of qualified certificates for individuals that enable them to sign digital documents through advanced electronic signature. We are the first bank in Croatia which has implemented this feature, with which we fully comply with the internal regulation and EU regulation. This enables our customers to contract any service via the Internet or mobile phone, without the need to go to the bank. We started with cash loans, but will certainly not stop there," said Dijana Hrastović, a member of the Management Board of Zagrebačka Banka, talking about business development with the help of technology.

Damir Horvat, Combis sales manager for Croatian and foreign markets, said that in the future more and more emphasis will be placed on bank generated data, which is why Combis has developed an advanced system which improves the transaction processing speed, brings them to real time and allows monetization of large amounts of data.

"The development of intelligent devices increases the amount of data they generate. Therefore, we have developed Husky - Big Data platform that allows users to safely monetize large amounts of data. Applications of such data are numerous, and the presentation of this information is very simple - in the form of heat map, dashboards and reports," said Horvat and pointed out that Combis Husky solution is in line with EU legislation for protection of the rights and privacy of consumers.