Interview | Niels Van Daatselaar Co-Founder & CEO at TreasurUp

TreasurUp's Co-Founder and CEO, Niels Van Daatselaar, shared his thoughts and ideas on the current digital transformation priorities for Financial Insituitions after the Pandemic, how he felt the new period of digital transformation is affecting the customer expectation and experience and how the customer experience has changed changed after COVID-19? Continue on reading Niels answers to find out more on the hot topic of digital transformation and how the Fintech sector are adapting to the ever changing Fintech landscape.

What do you think should be the 3 digital transformation priorities for Financial Institution after the pandemic?

• Have a client-validated strategy on how to compose value layers in the online offering beyond the plain-vanilla execution.
• Moving towards the eco-system model: working with a multitude of different companies (e.g. fintechs) that can complement the strengths of the bank. That goes guys further than the traditional buy or build strategies.
• Becoming bolder in terms of getting the legacy out. Both the legacy infrastructures as well as the people maintaining them are slowing the bank down.

How can banks adapt to ensure they remain competitive with FinTech-led challenger banks?

Banks still have a lot of unique assets: balance sheet, very knowledgeable people, products, client base, IT power, etcetera. The main challenge is to utilize these assets much better.

What advice would you give to banks in building a resilient, future-proof digital transformation strategy to withstand and future uncertainty?

Focus on unambiguous values for clients that make clients want to stay and do more with their bans. For that: offer true value in each channel, open up to other banks and service providers (bilateral is going to change), have a clear BaaS strategy, think ‘connectivity’, review the agility and innovation power of your staff, reconsider the annual planning, budget and project cycles. An important item here is how to move from reactive service models (client has a request > bank delivers product) towards pro-active ones.

How do you feel this new period of digital transformation is affecting customer expectation and experience?

Clients nowadays switch easily between their banks for small preferences, like efficient journey support. Across all products pricing is becoming more transparent just as the actual services being delivered for that.

What have been your company’s main priorities in helping financial services in this post-pandemic world?

TreasurUp mainly focuses on helping banks in getting the SME journey’s right: multi-product, multi-currency, multi-bank and multi-channel. This means we aim at creating a wow-effect for all SMEs using our white labeled online services through banks. Next to that we aim to provide our banks partners with refreshing new ideas, concept and MVP that they can validate with their client base in order to keep them ahead of the curve.

To what extent has customer behaviour played a role in influencing digital transformation strategies for leading banks?

Leading banks have been very keen during the last few years to be at the forefront of the new digital era that is earmarked by API’s, AI, Blockchain and Open Banking. Our observation is that the large global banks are refreshingly open to work with fintechs in a kind of eco-system model.

What do you hear are the main challenges from your clients when partnering with FinTech firms?

Banks are asking questions like:

• Are they – us as fintech player - still there in 5 years from now?
• How to integrate their services in what we as a bank already have?
• Can our internal IT department do it better/cheaper?
• Does the fintech solution meet our security requirements?

How have you seen customer behaviour and demand changing after COVID-19? How will this continue to change? 

Amongst our bank clients we have seen a rapid increase in the number of SMEs moving to online solutions from their banks. Bankers are nowadays speaking with clients through video calls which has changed the relationship. Banks have substantially increased their online ambitions and budgets and are accelerating their innovation.

Data is playing a much bigger role in transformation strategies – how can we ensure we are analysing data efficiently to aid data-driven decisions?

Data analytics is a vital element for banks to get right and for improving their services. This means they need to start measuring first: how are clients using our services, what alternatives do they have, how satisfied are they. Ideally, this is not done per business line but holistically per client segment. Once a bank is getting used to measuring they can more easily make the transition to doing more with the data and towards actionable data analytics; both for clients as well as for bankers.