While crowdlending in Asia Pacific shows early promise, its fate will be dictated by how regulators and banks respond to the challenges they pose.

Nazmul Karim Chowdhury, Senior Vice President and Head of Brand at City Bank, Bangladesh, describes how cautious optimism toward mobile financial services is slowly permeating Bangladesh society, from institutions to rural areas.

Innovations emerging from East and West African banking hubs are enabling the sector to take a lead in reaching Africa’s unbanked population but much remains to be done.

Banks face high costs of maintaining extensive branch networks while having their market share eroded by the ever-growing presence of payments solutions companies and mobile operators providing low-cost alternatives.

The industry has to look beyond growing their market presence through traditional brick-and-mortar branches by exploring new channels like mobile banking and agency collaborations.

Social media, coupled with data analytics, gives a more complete picture of the customer but banks face the challenge of having to make sense of masses of unstructured information.

Alex Thursby, group CEO of NBAD, highlights the importance of liquidity as he discusses the bank’s new customer-focused strategy.

Mobile banking in Saudi Arabia is still growing and its development is contingent upon customer needs, as the actual number of mobile transactions is low.