What are the top-of-mind topics for banks in 2027? This is the core question we have been asking our community through a survey (please consider taking 5 minutes to share your views anonymously here if you haven’t already) as we look ahead and kick off our Q4 research for our final White Paper of the year.

Why we are asking, not predicting

I hasten to add that this will not be a “predictions” report. We don’t do predictions at The Banking Scene, and I’m sure that there will be the normal flood of 2027 predictions from analysts, vendors and service providers filling up your feeds over the next few months.

Our approach for this paper is a bit different, and it uses a simple interview/analysis construct I developed and refined over the last twenty years. 

A lesson from my Visa Europe days

Twenty years ago, I was Vice President of Technology Research for Visa Europe, when I strategically positioned myself to sit next to the CEO during a “Trends for the year ahead” presentation delivered by a third-party vendor. I planned to use the occasion to bring my newly formed department’s work to the CEO’s attention, and it couldn’t have worked out better!

As the presenter worked through the slides, it quickly became obvious that he'd prepared the deck for bankers and didn’t understand the difference between a payment network and a bank. He spoke about interest rates (not set by Visa), customer onboarding (not done by Visa) and a whole host of other points that were completely irrelevant to Visa at that point in time. 

Back then, our customers were banks and merchants, and our biggest competitor was cash, not MasterCard and Amex, as he mistakenly thought.

About halfway through the presentation, the CEO leaned over to me and said: “I would prefer to hear what our own staff and customers think are the major topics we need to be focusing on in the years ahead rather than sitting through a presentation from someone who clearly doesn’t understand our business”, which was music to my ears! 

What the vendor presentation lacked most were stories and anecdotes from people with real-world industry knowledge. The presentation was basically a thinly veiled sales pitch for their products and services, which they wanted to push on us for the year ahead.

I knew we could do better! 

From that point forward, my department spent much of its time on horizon scanning and scouting. Each year, we collated hundreds of data points gathered by attending and participating in events, holding knowledge-sharing sessions with vendors and academic institutions, hosting workshops and interviews with our own staff and customers (banks and merchants), and distilling insights from analyst organisations. We published our findings in a biannual report and did quarterly “roadshow” presentations, which further stimulated discussion and debate about the future of the payments industry.

While we made use of many tools and techniques to analyse the data and hypothesise about the possible, plausible and probable future(s) of the industry (see “Looking Through The Lens of Strategic Foresight” that I previously wrote), there was one core train of thought that ran through everything we did: 

What, so what, now what?

For every single topic, we considered:

What? 

• What do we want to bring to people’s attention?
• A simple description in non-technical terms that everyone could understand

So what?

• If the topic was already known or on people’s radar, what had changed since we last saw, read or spoke about it?
• Why had its importance changed?
• Does it change any previous assumptions?
• What are the impacts and implications to individuals, departments, organisations, customers, suppliers and the industry in general?
• Does it open new opportunities?
• Does it introduce new threats?

Now what?

• What should “we”, you, our organisations or industry be doing about it?
• What is the “call to action”?

As a very simple example (my own, not a guest response), consider this:

What? APP scams where criminals are persuading customers to authorise payments themselves, and when money moves in seconds, there is no time to recall it.

So what? Traditional fraud models assumed an intruder, but when the customer presses "send", that assumption fails, and so do the detection, liability, and customer service processes built on it.

Now what? Add friction at the right moments in the journey, share intelligence between institutions, and show customers what a scam looks like before they encounter one.

A few years after I left Visa, I expanded on this approach as part of my “Innovation Toolkit” workshop series and even published a simple workbook for people to use themselves. But this isn’t a promotional post about a past life, so I’m not linking to that here :)

What is relevant is that I’m now taking this approach for my next series of interviews with industry leaders by asking them what their top 3 top-of-mind topics are as they begin their 2027 planning process.

Why three topics counted down?

The combination of 3 simple questions, “what, what, what?”, may sound repetitive at first, but the “Rule of 3” is a powerful cognitive concept that harnesses pattern recognition, memory retention, emotional impact, and linguistic appeal. (Participants in our Think Tanks will recognise this from our “3 Thoughts” approach).

By limiting my interviewees to their “top 3 topics”, they must mentally consider the myriad other things on their plate and focus on the most important ones they want to bring to people’s attention.

To add a bit of tension to the interviews and hopefully keep people listening to the end, I ask interviewees to reveal their top 3 in reverse order: 3, 2, 1. 

The interviews are already underway and will be published each week in the lead-up to the publication of the white paper, which will be a synthesis of our survey results and the interviews, complemented by desk research and industry analysis, all of which will inform our research agenda for next year and will help shape the conversations we stimulate at our upcoming events.

If you work in a bank and are willing and able to share your thoughts in an interview sometime in November, please get in touch here ASAP. 

Oh, and spoiler alert: I do ask a fourth and final question to close off the interview with something a bit provocative, but you will have to listen to them or participate in one to find out what that is!

Rik discusses Andrew's approach in this week's episode of The Banking Scene Director's Cut, which you can watch below or follow along on your favourite podcast channel here.