Author: Stefanie Auge-Dickhut

Stefanie is passionate about developing innovative business models in cross-industry ecosystems based on innovative technologies. After completing a banking apprenticeship, her studies, and her doctorate, she worked for more than 10 years for Ernst & Young and UniCredit Group in the area of corporate finance advisory, and then went on to establish applied research and training courses focusing on digital banking at a Zurich university of applied sciences. She has been head of the Future Financial Services Competence Center since 2018. Stefanie is a speaker, advisor, author, and lecturer.

Agentic AI in Banking: Who Wins the Customer’s Trust When Decisions Are Delegated to AI?

Posted on By

Agentic AI is transforming the banking industry by enabling autonomous AI agents to make decisions and execute actions on behalf of customers. As trust shifts from traditional advisers to intelligent agents, banks face a critical strategic challenge: who will own the customer relationship in the age of AI? This article explores the opportunities, risks, and business implications of Agentic AI through real-world examples and industry insights.

Continue reading »
AI, All, Data, Digitization, News, Nicht kategorisiert, Regulations, technologies

Sovereignty in the Age of AI: What Banks Can Actually Decide

Posted on By

How sovereign are banks really when it comes to the use of artificial intelligence?

Many institutions are investing heavily in AI. But the real question is no longer which application to implement, but where genuine strategic freedom still exists.

Our latest article explores:

• Why banks are becoming increasingly dependent on a small number of providers for chips, infrastructure, and standards
• Why dual sourcing may reduce outages, but does not create strategic independence
• Why proprietary data has become the most important lever for differentiation
• What role European AI models, cloud providers, and regulatory initiatives can play

The key distinction is no longer “make or buy”, but:
A redundancy strategy against outages — or a sovereignty strategy against loss of control?

How high is AI sovereignty currently on your institution’s agenda?

Continue reading »
AI, All, Data, Digitization, News, Nicht kategorisiert, technologies

Digital Customer Proximity: How Collaboration Increases Customer Benefit

Posted on By

How can banks expand their relevance in customers’ daily lives? How can banks redefine their role in their customers’ everyday lives? In our latest blog post, we use selected examples to show how institutions are creating real added value across connected living environments through innovative services – from mobility budgets and ETF-based rental deposits to health incentives through interest rate models. The article by Dr. Stefanie Auge-Dickhut explores:
• how Customer Centricity is enabled through positioning of financial serivces in netwerks,
• the growing importance of Embedded Finance and Platform Banking,
• and why financial services are becoming part of connected, everyday experiences.
Based on an extract form over 80+ international use cases, the article offers tangible inspiration for financial players aiming to drive relevance through innovation.

Continue reading »
All, Data, Digitization, News, Nicht kategorisiert, technologies

AI Radar 2025: Why technology alone is not enough – insights from banks and IT providers

Posted on By

The first version of our AI Radar for the DACH region from fall 2024 clearly showed how intensively banks are already using artificial intelligence (LINK). Based on publicly available information, we analyzed the largest banks in the DACH region to determine which AI use cases they have already implemented and systematically structured them according to various criteria.
But how has reality changed since then? Stefanie Auge-Dickhut describes our current AI Radar survey, in which we conducted qualitative interviews with partner banks and IT providers of the Competence Center Future Financial Services to identify deeper insights, experiences and new strategic challenges in dealing with AI in the financial industry.

Continue reading »
AI, All, News, Nicht kategorisiert, technologies

Impact of Innovative Technologies on Business Ecosystems

Posted on By

Technological innovations have always been catalysts for social change – but never before have business ecosystems been so visibly at the center of attention. Whether we are making contactless payments, consulting chatbots or entering virtual worlds – often, business ecosystems are based on platforms, which are an important part of orchestrating value creation. Platforms are purpose-built organizational and transactional infrastructures of business ecosystems.
A change in key technological foundations often has an impact on how the business models of business ecosystems change via the platform. The Internet of Things, artificial intelligence, distributed ledger technology and the emerging metaverse act as turbochargers – they not only connect objects, but also markets, communities and entire business models. In the following blog post, Stefanie Auge-Dickhut outlines some thoughts on the impact of innovative technologies and data on the technological basis of business ecosystems.

Continue reading »
All, Data, Digitization, Ecosystems, Nicht kategorisiert

AI cases in banking – AI radar of the Business Engineering Institute St.Gallen

Posted on By

The financial industry is beginning to undergo a profound transformation through the use of AI. In particular, the use of generative AI opens up the possibility of creating new content such as texts, images, videos or music. In autumn 2024, we started building an AI radar that systematically analyzes use cases of banks in German-speaking countries. This blog post offers an overview of use cases and maturity levels in the banking sector and provides exciting insights into the status quo.

Continue reading »
AI, All, Data, News, Nicht kategorisiert, technologies

The journey from open banking to embedded finance to contextual banking and the future role of banks

Posted on By

If you look at today’s bank customers, they are always digitally active in their respective living environments. McMakler provides an example of positioning in customers’ living environments. If people search for design ideas for self-built furniture on Pinterest, for example, McMakler displays real estate offers that match their known living preferences. This happens in the context of a cooperation between McMakler and over 400 banks. Under certain conditions, banks can therefore offer their services in the respective living environments of their customers. However, this option is only one alternative as to how banks or individual banking divisions can position themselves strategically. In Stefan Knaus’ blog post from October 24, 2023, we presented four different strategic role profiles in the context of open banking. Now we would like to take a look at current market developments and which use cases have driven banks forward. We will also classify the terms “embedded finance” and “contextual banking”, which are frequently used in this context.

Continue reading »
0
All, Data, Digitization, News, Nicht kategorisiert

Blog post Governance mechanisms in the context of platforms and business ecosystems

Posted on By

Less than 15% of business ecosystems are successful in the long term – the main reason for failure is weaknesses in the governance model. It is therefore time to question which governance mechanisms are fundamentally available for business ecosystems and whether there are any application examples (successful or failed). The following blog post looks at a possible catalog of incentive and control mechanisms for business ecosystems.

Continue reading »
0
All, Ecosystems, News, Nicht kategorisiert

Development of Business Ecosystems in the DACH Region and the Potential of “Digital Files” as a Starting Point for Integrated Services

Posted on By

For the past four years, the Ecosystems Competence Center has been regularly investigating which business ecosystems are emerging and developing in the DACH region. This ecosystem radar is supplemented by selected international business ecosystems. A fundamental prerequisite for offering customers integrated solutions through various partners in a Business Ecosystem is the concept of the “digital file”. By this we mean a collection of relevant data related to a specific object on which these solutions focus. Such digital files, e.g. around the object house or car, are currently emerging in all Business Ecosystem areas we observe. This blog post describes the developments of selected Business Ecosystems as well as approaches of digital files.

Continue reading »
0
All, Digitization, Ecosystems, technologies

Leadership in Swiss Banks

Posted on By

How are leadership styles developing in Swiss banks – basically, Lewin’s traditional leadership styles such as authoritarian/patriarchal, cooperative, etc. are well known. Nowadays, a distinction can also be made between transactional and transformational leadership. This article explains how these leadership styles differ from each other and why the leadership styles in banks are changing towards agile organizational forms.

Continue reading »
0
All, Data, Digitization, Ecosystems, Nicht kategorisiert, Regulations, technologies

Trend Impact Radar 2023: New Trends for the Financial Industry – Part 2

Posted on By

The Competence Center Ecosystems regularly identifies and analyzes the most important trends impacting financial institutions and financial-related service providers. In doing so, we address the development of megatrends, macrotrends and microtrends as well as their impact on the financial industry. As a follow-up to our last blog, which focused on the megatrends and macrotrends we identified as newly relevant to the financial industry in our last internal update, today I would like to present a selection of related microtrends that relate to the topics of data, customer, employees and corporate responsibility.

Continue reading »
0
All, Ecosystems, Nicht kategorisiert

Trend Impact Radar 2023: New Trends for the Financial Industry

Posted on By

The Competence Center Ecosystems regularly identifies and analyzes the most important trends impacting financial institutions and financial-related service providers. In doing so, we address both the development of megatrends, macrotrends and microtrends as well as their impact on the financial industry. Today, I would like to share the four mega and macro trends that we have newly identified as relevant to the financial industry in our latest internal update: Web 3.0, AR & VR / Metaverse, Generation without Borders / Permanent Beta and Standards in Telecommunications.

Continue reading »
0
Digitization, Ecosystems, Nicht kategorisiert

Race for the Pole Position in the Metaverse – Business Opportunities for Banks

Posted on By

In the media, Meta (formerly Facebook) is positioning itself very strongly as the future metaverse, and it seems as if Meta is building the “one” metaverse. This impression is deceptive. In this article, we will talk about what a metaverse is, which competitors are currently building metaverses, and what opportunities they open up for banks.

Continue reading »
0
Digitization, Ecosystems, technologies

9 Steps to Unlocking Business Ecosystems

Posted on By

The development of a business ecosystem promises the opportunity to provide existing customers with integrated services through cooperation, in some cases across industries, and to gain access to new customer groups. However, building a business ecosystem by yourself is a challenging task, as there are many parties to orchestrate around a value proposition that is attractive to all participants. To increase the chances of success for such a project, it is worth taking a structured approach that not only helps with the design of a promising solution, but also with discovering potential stumbling blocks as early as possible and, at best, avoiding them. One such approach, which is already used by several banks in German-speaking countries, is presented in this article.

Continue reading »
0
All, Ecosystems

Five Data Strategies for Banks

Posted on By

Ideally, a bank’s data strategy should be derived from its corporate strategy. Possible goals of the data strategy can be process optimization with associated cost reduction, better customer understanding (which can also lead to cost reduction or revenue optimization), or the development of new business models. The following blog post provides an overview of which data strategies for banks there are generally and which use cases can be observed in practice.

Continue reading »
0
All, Data

The Potential for Innovative Business Models in the Financial Industry with the Establishment of a Circular Economy

Posted on By

To preserve our world for future generations, we must take action now to stop global warming. The interesting question is how to achieve this. If you consider that CO2 emissions are largely caused directly or indirectly by us consumers, you could assume that we would have to do away with the customer. “Traditional sustainability makes the customer the enemy.” This is where the concept of the Circular Economy comes in, with its concept of decoupling growth and resource consumption. In contrast to linear value creation with its “take-make-use-dispose” concept, the Circular Economy relies on a regenerative system, a circular economy in which the concept of “waste” no longer exists.

Continue reading »
0
All

Business Ecosystem, Innovation Ecosystem, Platform Ecosystem – How Many Ecosystem Terms Do We Really Need?

Posted on By

The trend towards value creation in ecosystems has led to a multitude of ecosystem definitions in the past. This makes it difficult even for the interested reader to understand the research results presented. To what extent do the ecosystem concepts really differ and can the findings of one field be transferred to the other?

Continue reading »
0
All, Ecosystems

Effects of the Coronavirus Pandemic on the Financial Industry

Posted on By

Since the beginning of 2020, the coronavirus pandemic has caused an enormous slump in the global economy due to lockdowns all over the world. The IMF expects global GDP to decline by 5%, and for the euro zone it is likely to be as much as 10.2% [1] – and these are the figures before a possible second wave. It remains to be seen how the economy will recover. What can already be well assessed, on the other hand, are the qualitative effects of the pandemic on the macro trends relevant to the financial industry.

Continue reading »
0
Digitization, Ecosystems, News, technologies