"Nobody likes getting old, especially traditional banks that have found themselves straddling two financial worlds – old tech and new tech – while all the “young, cool kids” try to steal their customers and business.
If these banks want to survive, said Ramon Villarreal, global architect for financial services at Red Hat, they have no choice but to reinvent themselves.
“They have to stop thinking that they’re banks, and instead think, ‘Well, I'm actually a technology organization with a banking license,’” Villarreal told Karen Webster in a recent interview. “They have to innovate more. They have to implement new ways of thinking and working. They actually have to stop being the traditional bank and start thinking of their customers as partners.”
He said that although big banks are different today than they were 10 years ago and are always trying new things, most of that is due to customers' demands for more services, as well as “a huge weight of competition” that’s coming from neobanks and FinTechs.
“It's not because [legacy banks] can transform. It is because they have to do this,” Villarreal noted."