On January 30th, The Banking Scene organised its New Year's Boutique Conference 2020, and sparked the debate on trust in financial services.

We ended the evening with a panel called "How Should Banks Make Sure to Remain a Trusted Service Provider in The Future?".

Panellists were Thomas Steiger, CEO of VP Bank Luxembourg, Bruno Houdmont, CEO of Banque Degroof Petercam Luxembourg and Sarunas Legeckas, General Manager Greater Europe at N26.

The panel was moderated by Thibault de Barsy, currently Guest Lecturer at University of Luxembourg and Opinion Maker for LN24. We asked him for a brief evaluation.

At the conference in Luxemburg, we ended with a panel called “how banks can make sure to remain a trusted financial service provider in the future?” and Thibault de Barsy, who is currently a visiting professor at the University of Luxemburg, but previously also the CEO of Keytrade had the challenge to moderate that panel.

Thibault, what were your key takeaways from that panel?

Thibault: “Well, it’s not easy to be a banker today, right? You have a lot of regulations, clients have lost a lot of trust in banks since the 2008 crisis, but we see a lot of things evolving.

On the private bank side, definitely, there is a digitization of services there, there is increasing personalisation and effort put into the one to one relationship with the clients, and of course, we have the new kids on the block which is N26, which is providing a superb application with a six-minute account opening.

So, what I retain is that everyone is respecting each other. Everyone sees the difficulties of one and another and even as you have seen, even the private bankers use the services of N26 because they are fascinated by the easiness and on the other hand know that N26 doesn’t offer the same depth in terms of product range and service as the private banks.

So I think all in all, it was extremely interesting to see the extent to which everyone is trying to please client because I think in terms of satisfaction and loyalty, the banks that were there in the panel, retail or private, were very convincing in the way they are satisfying their clients, even if in general, the trust in banks seems not to have recovered since the financial crisis.”

I think what was pretty unique at the panel today, we had the General Manager of N26, talking to the CEO of Degroof Petercam Luxembourg and the CEO from VP Bank Luxembourg, they are competitors to some extent, but they were all talking together like friends about trust. Now did you notice any differences in the way these different kinds of bank approach trust towards their customers?

Thibault: “Well I’m sure that of course because of N26 being 100% mobile, they have instant measures of what their clients are doing: the number of interactions, the use of their services, while it’s a completely different story with private banks, but in the same world and we live under the same regulation, and we live in the same difficult context of negative interest rate.

This hurts the neobanks in the same way as it hurts the private banks, or even worse. So, for that we are all in the same boat I think therefore it is why you at least observe a lot of respect and comprehension between those bankers who have different client bases indeed.”

Would you like to be part of the debate? Join us in Amsterdam on September 24 or in Brussels on May 12.