Due to the fundamental digitization of social/economic life, it takes on an “on” and “offline” scale image of the world. While analyzing the impact of the ongoing pandemic on the segmentation of world markets, the disruptions in the functioning of some industries, sectors, and entire economies are becoming deeper. The spread of COVID-19 has led to the dysfunction of a known ecosystem, and the destructive force of human isolation and the lockdown of economies have significantly influenced the behavior of societies and governments. Many customer-centric companies have reactively redefined their strategies, and the financial sector, especially banks, was to play an important role in absorbing the shock by providing the necessary credit to businesses and households. Meanwhile, the same institutions have experienced capital and liquidity destabilization due to increased risk reserves created and an operating in conditions of historically low interest rates. Unexpectedly, the pandemic has become another determinant of the new quality of processes, phenomena, and business models.
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The rise of the Internet and the digital transformation of highly developed countries that has been going on for several decades led to the fourth industrial (Schwab, 2016) revolution. Observing this year's changes caused by the risk of COVID-19, it can be argued that the pandemic has a chance to become a catalyst for technological and model improvements accelerating the emergence of another in a much shorter time.
For several decades, the finance sector has been the most efficient in implementing technological innovations, redefining product distribution channels and ways of effectively interacting with customers. In the 1960s, banks introduced ATMs, in the early 1970s they enabled electronic card payments, in the first decade of the 21st century, online banking was made available to financial services recipients on a large scale, and from 2010 on-line forms of contact in the “e” and “m” banking (Accenture, 2020) formats were becoming more and more common.
In the era of digitization of economies, new driving forces appeared to support the development of the banking industry. One of them is Big Data (Marz, Warren, 2015). which facilitates the processing of collected data in terms of, inter alia, customer segmentation and personalization of offers. In one of the largest Polish banks, its clients perform 6 million transactions and 4 million logins to electronic banking (Jagiełło, Kubisiak, 2020) every day. Every year, the bank processes the data provided by the execution of 2.5 billion payment transactions. Processing such resources requires state-of-the-art computing units and the use of resources from another breakthrough in the computing system - cloud computing (IDG Research, 2020). In Europe, the Scandinavian countries are the leaders in cloud computing applications. The percentage of companies using data processing in the cloud reaches 70%.
At the MIT Sloan School of Management, management professor Eryk Brynjolfsson, together with his colleagues, compared the performance of companies where decisions were made on the basis of data analysis with the performance of other companies (Brynjolfsson, Hitt, Kim, 2011). The team found that they were 6% more productive than companies that did not make much use of the available data when making decisions. Currently, the skillful processing of Big Data is a source of profitability optimization and a sustainable competitive advantage (Mayer-Schönberger, Cukier, 2013) for many companies.
Parallel to the development of cloud computing, the impact of another field of science was discovered - artificial intelligence (Redefine banking with Artificial Intelligence, 2020) on the reduction of data storage and processing costs and the relationship between Internet access, user connectivity in the network and the emergence of innovative forms of contact between the customer and the bank (biometrics, voice assistant, chatbots, video consultant).
In the financial industry, it is estimated that artificial intelligence has the potential to unlock $ 1 trillion a year in additional value for banks (McKinsey&Company, 2020). Both disciplines complement each other creating a new conceptualization of business assumptions.
The advent of advanced technologies is an example of the dynamics of discoveries in the early 2000s. In the management sphere, their key consequence is a new format for business scaling - platformization of services breaking with the hierarchical structure of work in favor of collaborative (Srinival, Schoeps, 2019) network models. The new model gives a scale effect and increases the contact with mass customers to the level of a prosumer. According to experts, in the digital age, service platforms will become the future of e.g. banks forced to compete on the payments market with the largest technology companies.
In the face of economic disruptions manifested by the current epidemic situation, the ability to adapt high technologies is described as one of the main factors determining the post-pandemic positioning of a company. The example of Bigtechs (Business Insider Inteligence, 2019) or Fintechs (EBA, 2019) shows that operating globally even in the period of economic downturn due to Covid-19, there is the potential to achieve financial inclusion (Spence, 2019).
Figure 1. The top most valuable tech brands of 2020 (brand value in $US billions and rounded to the nearest billion)