Simon Dummel is engaged in researching innovative banking concepts in the context of digital ecosystems. After completing his studies in business administration and a master's degree in international business and sustainability, he worked in the financial sector for several years—including at Frankfurter Bankgesellschaft and DZ Bank—with a focus on in-house consulting and project management in digital transformation projects. Since 2025, he has been a research associate and doctoral candidate at the Competence Center Future Financial Services, where he is pursuing a doctorate in contextual banking and supporting consulting projects with banks, fintechs, and other partners. His goal is to design banking processes in such a way that they create real added value along the customer journey and noticeably improve the banking experience for customers.

Securities Business in Transition: Why Automation, Integration and Modularity Determine Competitiveness

The securities business in the DACH region is now technologically mature. An anonymised provider survey on service design shows why competition is shifting all the same: interfaces, automation and modular architectures have become standard equipment. The distance between providers opens up elsewhere.

Three findings from the analysis:

– Most providers share a solid, comparable technological base. It has become a hygiene factor. The gap is created by depth of automation, integration quality and modularity.

– Automation tends to cover individual steps rather than the full process. The bottleneck is exception handling: incomplete data, regulatory warnings, special cases in savings plans. Without structured exception handling, automation reaches its limits as volumes grow.

– Interfaces exist almost everywhere, but their usability differs widely. Providers that run their APIs as a product, with a clear scope and stable data models, connect partners faster and scale services more efficiently.

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What SMEs really expect from banks today and why context is more important than the next product

The expectations of small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) are shifting: from product portfolios to real contextual relevance in day-to-day business.
In his latest blog post, Simon Dummel, Research Associate & PhD Candidate at the Business Engineering Institute St. Gallen, explains:
– Why payment services are essential but underutilised
– How advisory must evolve into contextual, ongoing processes
– Why contextualisation is a key capability for future banking
– The positioning potential for banks as service partners in the SME segment

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(Open) Corporate Foresight: The Potential of Strategic Future Analysis in Start-ups

Actively shaping the future: corporate foresight as a start-up advantage

Many start-ups rely on agility—but in uncertain, complex markets, that is not enough. If you want to identify opportunities early on and better assess risks, you need a structured view of the future: corporate foresight.

Corporate foresight allows weak signals and new trends to be identified at an early stage. Open foresight expands this approach by involving external partners and communities, creating collective intelligence for better decisions.

Lean startup and foresight are not contradictory: while lean startup enables rapid validation of ideas, foresight provides strategic orientation. Together, they reduce uncertainty and strengthen innovative power.

In our latest blog post, Simon Dummel shows that future competence is not a luxury for startups, but rather the foundation for sustainable success.

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