Sustainability: A byproduct of better decision making in the banking industry

By: Howard Moore, Mobiquity

Mobiquity’s Global Benchmark for Sustainable Banking Research Report highlights the difficulties faced by senior executives in the Financial Services industry. A landscape that was changing at an increasingly rapid pace has, along with the customers it serves, faced a massive challenge during the COVID-19 pandemic. Therefore, it is to be expected that many banking executives saw COVID-19 as their largest challenge to date, while other concerns were pushed into the background — to accommodate immediate short- and medium-term challenges.

As different markets mature in their sustainability efforts at varying speeds, senior banking executives are faced with similar decisions to make, but with different factors influencing those decisions. A bank’s relationship with society — and specifically the impact on society’s resources — is becoming a key factor in how it is planning and implementing its day to day operations.

Employee welfare, operational efficiency, overheads, and a financial institution’s relationship with its customers and by extension society, are not new decisions. What has changed and continues to evolve are factors that influence these decisions, and the methods with which to solve these frictions. As all senior decision makers are all too aware, it is not possible to look at any of these decisions in isolation. A move to increase or decrease one factor will influence at least one, if not all of the others.

The methods by which we are now able to find solutions to these decisions have changed in such a way that it does enable us to look at ‘win-win’ scenarios. Implementing digital, composable solutions, will not only help banks drive tangible operational efficiency and cost reductions, they also lead to more sustainable outcomes. In addition, by providing flexible and mobile solutions to accelerate connectivity with customers and employees, these digital solutions enable greater control over banking interactions and how customers access banking services.

Our report shows that banks are becoming aware of the importance of digital technologies to solve environmental concerns. Meanwhile, smart data is central to informed, sustainable decision making. As digital transformation provides greater information flows to the frequency and type of services being used, we are able to not only improve our ESG efforts but provide better information on measuring and monitoring their relative impact.

By combining smart data to the regional standards highlighted above, a bank is able to actively demonstrate how its decision making is impacting sustainability, and its understanding of the changing landscape of consumer and employee concerns. The future of banking is one where a sustainable outcome is the by-product of better decision making.

Originally published at https://www.mobiquity.com.