Consumer banking has become increasingly digitized across Latin America in recent years, due to supportive regulatory policy and frameworks, mobile Internet adoption programs, and a rapid expansion of digital consumer services, especially in payments. However, challenges to further digitization remain, depending on country, resulting in different priorities and plans for future investment by banks across the region.
Technology budgets are growing this year and next but can vary between individual banks and countries. However, Celent sees several common themes for the region. For example, banks across LATAM are focused on new digital customer acquisition, improvements to digital channel experience, and taking part in the open banking ecosystem. Most banks have put strategies in place for open banking/finance, but these efforts are increasingly constrained by the limitations of legacy technology. In fact, the overall view of the region’s technology investment priorities is a fine balance between internal foundational upgrades and improved customer-facing and product propositions.
Another common theme is a strong priority on data technologies, including advanced analytics and AI (including GenAI). A distinction in this region is the expectation to implement GenAI capabilities in customer-facing initiatives, but not so much in support channels or marketing, where other global regions place high priority this year.
To shed light on the business pressures and technology priorities of the industry, Celent has completed its third global survey of senior executives at retail banks: The Celent Dimensions Survey 2024. This study captures the insights and opinions of 29 respondents at financial institutions across Latin America to provide an in-depth view into attitudes across the region, as well as highlighting the leading technology priorities for the year ahead and the products and processes that will see the greatest change.
Key findings include:
- 41% believe that the competitive threat from fintechs and other challengers is increasing, but this concern has declined steadily in recent years.
- 59% report that replacing or modernizing legacy/end-of-life systems and platforms is a top-three driver of their technology strategy, ahead of enhancements to the customer experience (41%).
- 38% have highlighted consumer banking channels and 34% name digital account opening as key product-level priorities, ahead of investments in small business digital channels, open banking, and loan origination.
- 52% say that current systems are a constraint to pursuing open banking and open finance initiatives, up from only 8% last year.
- 72% state that they expect to launch new customer-facing services using Gen AI in 2024.
