These are the main conclusions of the discussion "Digitisation of the financial sector, how are financial institutions changing?" Experts questioned whether smaller domestic banks can become beneficiaries of the high pace of digitisation of the entire sector, or whether this means that they will have to bear ever-increasing costs that are disproportionate to their size.
Grzegorz Cimochowski, partner, head of business consultancy at KPMG, pointed out that in Europe, four countries have a very advanced level of digitisation of the banking sector. "These are Spain, Turkey, Russia and Poland. These countries have one common denominator: a high-tech player emerged in each of them about 15-20 years ago, forcing the market to adapt quickly to new standards," Cimochowski said.
Adam Pers, Vice-President for corporate and investment banking at mBank, stressed that the European banking sector has much stricter capital requirements than the American sector. In Europe, banking is more flexible, cheaper and technologically developed, especially in Poland. However, he stressed that technological advances will not replace humans and relationship banking will continue to be important.
Mirosław Skiba, President of SGB-Bank, expressed a similar opinion, pointing to the rapid technological progress that has recently taken place in cooperative banking. "Process automation is the future but only with a relational model. This is the advantage of traditional banking over fintechs," said President Skiba.
Jacek Jastrzębski, Chairman of the Financial Supervision Authority, noted that digitisation is proceeding rapidly because it is profitable for the industry. "The Supervision would like the effective use of technology to be followed by increased security of transactions, better detection of suspicious operations and elimination of pathologies in the system," said the Head of the Financial Supervision Authority.
