Reimagining the Customer Experience
This category showcases initiatives that leverage a variety of digital technologies to effectively engage clients, fostering a customer-centric approach that elevates loyalty, satisfaction, and advocacy. This includes significant enhancements in the bank’s marketing, sales and distribution, and management of customer channels, communications, engagement and relationships.
Core Offering Innovation
This category showcases innovative products and offerings, developed independently or through collaborative partnerships, that match customers’ evolving digital lifestyles to foster sustainable growth. These include breakthrough concepts that dramatically enhance, transform, or tailor the banks’ offerings to specific market segments across products such as deposits, credit, payments, investments, and advice.
Business Model Transformation
Creative new products and initiatives that transform the bank’s business model to expand or redefine its role in the evolving ecosystem. This category aims to acknowledge banks that have spearheaded transformative efforts to compete in the realm of "new-age banking". This includes scaling novel models like a digital-first proposition, embracing embedded finance, marketplace banking, super apps, BaaS, and similar innovations.
Social, Sustainable & Responsible Banking
This category honors banks that are inspirational in their approach to ESG within their organization and in the development of appropriate customer offerings to meet these emerging needs. This includes innovations that advance the bank’s social purpose and its commitment to being a good corporate citizen and a true ally of its customers in their journey.
Future Workforce
This category recognizes pioneering transformative initiatives that shape the future of their workforce. These projects cover changes to the work, workforce, employee experience, and overall organization culture in preparing for tomorrow, and include the use of data, technology, and new approaches to ensure employees are empowered and upskilled by machines, and how work is organized, performed, measured and managed.
Neobanks & Fintech Players
This category is reserved for banking start-ups, digital spinoffs of incumbent banks, and technology firms working within the banking industry. Initiatives cover the creation and/or application of innovative technology that enhances customers’ banking experience and/or develops new sources of revenue for the industry. Innovations must be stage-one funded, have a market release proposition, and/or have completed a successful market PoC.
Operational Excellence
This category awards banks that have successfully navigated the complexities of process re-engineering and smarter operations, laying the groundwork for profitable growth. Initiatives cover scalable processes that drive improved efficiency to support a faster pace of growth for the bank’s revenue stream and asset base than for its overhead costs.
Transformative Innovator of the Year
Jury member choice
The winner is a bank or banking group that has successfully achieved a best-in-class transformation approach to create and deliver tangible value. Their corporate vision also commits it to continuous innovation and embraces a journey of digital transformation to ensure the organization remains relevant, agile, and capable of adapting to the ever-evolving business landscape. You cannot submit your innovation in this category. There is a separate application form, and you must have submitted at least three innovations in any of the other seven categories to qualify.
Emerging Tech Innovation of the Year
Jury member choice
The convergence of game-changing technologies such as Cloud, Gen AI, Blockchain, Open APIs, IoT, and Mixed Reality brings our imagination of tomorrow’s banking to life. Better technology is always at the heart of every organization’s quest for providing future ready offerings and this particular award will recognize banks that are inspiring better banking by architecting the future by making the most of emerging technologies. Think new possibilities powered by Cloud, AI, Blockchain, Open APIs, IoT, and Mixed Reality.)