| European digital banking special focus |
| Profiles |
| • Boursorama: SocGen goes for broke in French digital race |
| • Openbank: Santander’s new blueprint for the future |
| • imaginBank: Europe’s coolest bank |
| • Hello bank!: BNP Paribas creates a pan-European digital brand |
| • ING: Online first-mover prepares its next transformation |
| • Comdirect: How to make money in German retail |
The rapid death of the high street is the latest manifestation of disruption from digital providers in consumer industries. Traditional banking brands, until recently, have appeared better protected than retailers. No online challengers have achieved real scale. The big banks themselves have either bought or launched most of the more successful products.
But just as supermarkets are still grappling with the idea of launching their own internet challengers, are the conditions now right for banks’ digital offshoots to really take off?
Benoît Legrand, ING’s chief innovation officer, talks in Copernican terms about the wider shift from branches to mobiles and laptops, and the greater freedom of choice that follows.
“Banks were thinking that they were the centre of the universe and customers revolved around them,” he says. “Now the power is shifting from the institution to the customer.”
