The revolution sweeping through financial services has brought new purely digital players to the market and is driving massive change through traditional banks and other financial institutions. Across the globe, customers’ digital experience is reshaping traditional banking services and relationships, and the Asia Pacific region is leading this transformation.

Partly in response to a pandemic that closed bank branches worldwide, customers are demanding almost every service to be available digitally, and in most cases, via a mobile app. Every bank is becoming a digital bank. Markets that have had a large unbanked population have, over the last few years, leapfrogged directly into mobile banking, bypassing traditional banking.

According to McKinsey’s 2021 Personal Finance Survey, the share of consumers in Asia actively using digital banking has jumped to 88% this year, compared to 65% four years ago. More than 60% of Asian consumers are now open to switching to a digitally-focused “direct” bank, McKinsey reports.

And financial services companies are raising their digital game. In VMware’s own Digital Frontiers 3.0 study, more than half of respondents said financial services groups in Southeast Asia had improved digital services compared to before the pandemic. 

The big digital shift has helped open the door for fintech players like Ant Group in China, BankBazaar in India and Afterpay in Australia to enter the market. It’s a market where the big digital names like PayPal, Stripe and India’s Paytm have already carved out substantial businesses. Along with China’s AliPay and WeChat Pay, which have been acknowledged as global leaders in fintech scale and innovation for some time.

To keep up with the disruption, traditional banks are innovating at a rapid pace and expanding their scope beyond traditional finance and are beginning to offer services that look more like those of pure fintechs. In Singapore, DBS’ PayLah app offers anything from simple payments to food orders and purchasing of public transport fares, while Thailand’s Kbank has teamed up with Grab for its own e-wallet service offering payments and loans. Services like PayNow in Singapore and the New Payments Platform in Australia allow customers of multiple banks to make payments to each other using only mobile phone numbers. Chinese giant Ping An, which started life as a conventional insurer, has become a technological powerhouse offering services across areas as diverse as healthcare, auto services and real estate. In India, HDFC Bank offers AI-powered 10-second car loan approvals.

One of the major drivers of the success of the new fintech players is their superior customer experience and ease of use. Traditional banks are innovating faster than ever to improve customer experience.

At VMworld, several leading financial institutions shared how they are transforming to become digital-led banks. Customer experience is key, powered by a move away from legacy infrastructure to agile, cloud-based platforms to keep up with what customers want.

In my discussions with banking technology leaders, there were some key common themes among their transformation strategies that stood out:

Eyeing the democratization of finance and greater competition, regulators around the Asia Pacific region seem keen to encourage the growth of new digital financial services. In this environment, some banks are even planning to shift their core banking systems into the cloud—something that would have seemed unlikely not that long ago. More regulatory leeway is also increasing the speed of change, which is adding to the pressure on all players to keep up.

And all this is happening in an environment of greatly increased competition. As well as the new breed of fintechs, companies from other industries, such as telco, are also beginning to offer financial services to their large existing customer bases.

“We are a tech company with a banking license,” is something we now hear all the time as traditional banks embrace tech and forge partnerships to compete in this new marketplace.

We are witnessing some of the biggest changes in financial technology since banks first computerized in the middle of last century and are heading into an exciting and customer-driven new era.

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