Last year, the financial industry witnessed some significant shakeups. Big tech players such as Apple and Facebook had begun to enter the payment scene. Analysts across the board were predicting 2020 to be the year big tech would make a grand entrance and launch one-stop shop integrations to support contactless, cashless and real-time transactions. However, this year brought a different wave of change, impacting financial institutions, providers and integrators of all sizes at varying levels – but in all cases, requiring rapid responses to meet the needs of various stakeholders.

With stay-at-home orders in place and credit unions shuttering their doors to footfall traffic, consumers and businesses were forced to shift all financial transactions to digital platforms. Managers of brick-and-mortar locations had no choice but to rapidly deploy online services to accommodate the forced change in consumer preferences. According to McKinsey & Company, the retail banking industry experienced up to three years of digital preference acceleration by the mid-year point in 2020. The integration of legacy methods – loan approvals, repayments, instant access to funds – and digital experiences would generally take several months to even years to deploy, and require planned budget allocations and staged rollouts over time.