GCC banks are aiming to expand digital and mobile customer offerings, even as the UAE’s e-commerce market is set to quadruple to $10 billion by 2018, according to Bank Audi.
 
Eighty-one per cent of UAE customers would switch banks for a better digital experience, and 60 per cent would move to a digital-only bank, according to a recent report by research firm EY, a professional services firm.

“In a highly competitive market, the UAE’s banks need to harness the power of digital products and services as the key differentiator for enhancing the customer experience, increasing their market share, and growing profits,” said Andrew Calthorpe, CEO, of banking IT solutions consultancy Condo Protego.

However, in the GCC and UAE, only 34 per cent of banking customers use mobile banking, and 55 per cent are not satisfied with current offerings, especially due to lack of real-time information and slow transaction speeds, according to the EY report.

As a result, UAE banks lag in digital engagement, with the average rate less than half that in India, Singapore, and the United States, according to a recent RFI Group survey.

“Banks in the UAE and the region need to accelerate their digital transformation journeys to meet customer demands, with the cornerstone being high-performance information storage and management. Banking CIOs need to have the real-time and scalable solutions that enable them to work smarter with their data,” added Calthorpe.

In anticipation of the exponential growth in customer data, UAE banks are adopting high-performance network-attached storage solutions, such as by EMC Isilon, he noted.

Network-attached storage combines file systems, volume management, and data protection into one unified layer, delivering more efficient, scalable, and agile network infrastructure. – TradeArabia News Service