2022 Global Outlook for Banking and Financial Markets

In the third year of a global pandemic, the financial services industry appears to be acclimating to a new reality. Many temporary measures put in place are now poised to become permanent, and a new industry structure is emerging.

In this year’s Global Outlook for Banking and Financial Markets (BFM), the BFM subject-matter experts in the IBM Industry Academy and the global industry leadership team reflected on their experience with clients over the last 12 months and their expectations for the coming year. Their collective point-of-view highlights the top industry imperatives in 2022:

• Real industry reinvention. Begin real reinvention—now—to solve the structural weaknesses that constrain financial performance.
• Customer-centric business models. Build new customer-centric platform business models to orchestrate and integrate the many needs of ecosystem participants in a more frictionless environment.
• End-to-end digitization. Embrace end-to-end extreme digitization to reshape operations and drive innovation. To win the race to all things digital, financial institutions are adopting new ways of exploiting exponential technologies such as automation, hybrid cloud, and AI.
• Operational resilience. Act with urgency to increase resiliency for better risk management and to address regulatory concerns.
• Viable sustainability. Find viable sustainability models so financial institutions can launch initiatives to meet market expectations, regulatory requirements, and corporate ethical objectives—all with an acceptable cost-benefit case.
• Transformed use of data and AI. Deploy AI factories and transformed data environments that put data in action to accelerate transformation.
• New workforce and new workplaces. Embrace the reality of a new workforce in new workplaces that redefine how, where, and when work is performed.
• New ecosystem architectures. Engage an ecosystem of partners to fuel faster innovation and efficiency.
• Emerging digital assets. Tap into the growing momentum for digital assets by working to create new customer and partner ecosystems, new products and services, and new use cases.
• Security and fraud. Stay one step ahead in the new frontiers of cybersecurity as bad actors become increasingly sophisticated.

Many organizations have already started addressing some or most of these compelling needs. Others are not keeping pace. Download the report to learn how financial institutions can act on these opportunities in 2022.