CONTEMPORARY DIRECTIONS ON HOW CONSUMERS INTERACT WITH FINANCIAL-BANKING SERVICES

Abstract

The COVID-19 pandemic and the disruptive forces of Open Banking have disturbed the global economy and how consumers interact with financial-banking services. While consumers stayed away from branches, banks and other financial services providers (reluctant to change their traditional models) were forced to adopt technology and other transformations to remain relevant in the market by meeting customers' requirements. For many financial institutions, the new reality has meant accelerating their internal and external digitization processes, while for others, it has revealed weaknesses in meeting consumers' needs. As online banking has gone from being "pleasant to have" to an indispensable "modus vivendi," many new banks have benefited from the technological gap. Thus, PSD2 has become an opportunity for established banks to gain new market share and sell products to customers they would not otherwise have reached. Open Banking has become a symbol of the digitalization and transformation of the financial sector in recent years. The original ideals of the Internet era give the consumer back control over the financial services performed and reduce the barriers to accessing them. Digital banks and neo banks are practically a new generation of banks operating exclusively through the Internet, which were born with the fundamental objective of facilitating financial operations for consumers, offering greater time flexibility (always available), and allowing the fast and easy performance of all types of operations, adapting perfectly to the trends of today's world, which has shown a great preference for everything digital. The digitalization of banks implies a radical transformation of the organizational culture, which should start from the principle that the bank must be constantly reinvented because customers expect cross-cutting, integrated, more fluid, and more agile services. This paper highlights how contemporary economic reality determines the behavior of consumers of financial-banking services and the evolution of financial intermediaries.