Building a customer-centric bank

Summary

Banking incumbents across Asia face mounting pressure to match the pace of change set by neobanks, digital-native challengers, and platform companies that have embedded financial services into their own ecosystems. Ketan Samani, Chief Digital Officer at China Development Financial Holding Corporation, argues that legacy infrastructure, rising technical debt, and process-first thinking keep banks focused on their own operations rather than the problems customers actually need solved.

Three distinct ways banks can position themselves within a broader financial ecosystem are laid out — as participants, as orchestrators, or as builders of an entirely new ecosystem from scratch — alongside the trade-offs of building proprietary platforms versus partnering with more agile fintechs. Profit-sharing in a naturally low-margin business emerges as one of the thorniest questions in any partnership model, alongside how banks can extend digital models into new geographies without sacrificing governance and compliance.

Cross-industry alliances spanning healthcare, telecom, manufacturing, transport, and food and beverage are presented as a route to geographic and product expansion, provided embedded-finance infrastructure is built to plug into partner rule sets. Ways to measure whether an ecosystem strategy is actually working are also explored, moving beyond traditional banking metrics toward engagement signals such as time spent and visit frequency that tie back to genuine customer-centricity.

How can a bank become the ecosystem’s electricity — essential to everything running, yet invisible to the people it powers?