Adopt FinTech, Financial Institutions Urged

KUALA LUMPUR, Nov 25 (Bernama) -- Financial institutions need to start adopting the financial technology (FinTech) even on a small scale, said PwC Consulting Services (M) Sdn Bhd. Its Consulting Leader, Andrew Chan, said this was crucial as the financial institutions had to continuously provide upgraded services for their customers or lose them in the future. "So start somewhere and now. My view is that financial institutions should start working with the FinTech companies, especially on pilot programmes," he told reporters after a dialogue session, titled 'Embrace FinTech or Risk Losing Your Competitive Edge in Today's Disruptive Landscape', here Friday. Chan, who was one of the panelists at the one-hour dialogue, said "although some of the pilot programmes may not work, eventually it will work as long as the culture (of trying) is there". FinTech is an economic industry comprising companies that use technology to make financial services more efficient. He said Malaysia was seeing different waves of responses to FinTech. The earlier ones were customers' convenience as well as efficiency, and the next wave, or the current wave, was how data analytics and data mining were being used by both FinTech companies and financial institutions to push services and convenient to move further, he said. "The next wave will be the predicting services or cross-selling, which you thought you might need, where the services push the products to you just to add another layer of convenient," he said. Meanwhile, PwC's Total Retail 2016 Survey showed that 82 per cent of the local financial institutions saw FinTech as a threat to their businesses. The survey said customers were ready to embrace FinTech but only 56 per cent were reported to buy online within the last three years. "The growth is, however, getting stronger as the penetration of smartphone is expected to exceed 100 per cent by 2018," it said. -- BERNAMA