Organised by PwC Luxembourg on 22 March 2019, this year’s Banking Day centred around business sustainability.
The theme of this year’s Banking Day, “Live long and prosper”, addressed the reality of the past few years and the transformation that is occurring across the banking sector. Indeed, the Luxembourgish business environment has entered a transition phase and new market players and the digital wave are forcing banks to rethink their strategies and digitise in order to respond to consumer expectations and defend market share against an increasing array of innovative and potentially disruptive competitors.
Participants enjoyed an agenda of top-level insight on recent changes and those still to come in this sector. Following the welcome note by Roxane Haas, Banking Leader at PwC Luxembourg, Claude Marx, CSSF Director General, spoke on supervisory and regulatory developments in the banking sector. He noted that: “The future is sustainable finance. [...] The banking system needs a homeopathic medicine rather than a chemical medicine, a solution that embraces a holistic, natural approach to the challenges it faces.”
The keynote speaker at this year’s event was, Stéphane Garelli, Professor Emeritus at IMD Business School and the University of Lausanne and author of “Top Class Competitors – How Nations, Firms and Individuals Succeed in the New World of Competitiveness.” According to him, to remain competitive, banks and companies in general will need to respond to the needs of the youth, whether they are clients, investors or the future workforce: “Think of who will be banks’ competitors tomorrow and where they are coming from. Who owns the technology highway, builds exits elsewhere to diversify using the power of data”.
Talk of competitiveness and how to achieve it paved the way for the central debate of the Banking Day, “Jurassic Banking: towards extinction or evolution?”, between the CEOs of Deutsche Bank Luxembourg, Frank Krings, on one side and Fidor Bank AG, Germany, Matthias Kröner, on the other.The debate saw Krings and Kröner confront their views and discuss the future of the banking industry.
In offering the Luxembourg government’s view with an update on the latest developments in the banking industry, Minister of Finance Pierre Gramegna commented: “Are banks becoming extinct? Banking services won’t become extinct. Newcomers will deliver comparable services; what will change is the way things are done. The key is the consumer and data about the consumer to shape experiences.". He added that: "Regulation is a pendulum that will continue, sometimes more, sometimes less. However, it might be an opportunity. While it can lead to ”uncompetitiveness”, it can make banks more competitive too. That’s why smart regulation is necessary, to make Europe stronger. Brexit will go, but digitalisation will stay.”
