Glenn is a passionate IT professional with close to three decades of experience across diverse technology functions. Before joining J Trust Royal Bank in 2019, he successfully handled key roles across numerous companies such as Ly Hour Pay Pro, WING Cambodia, EZECOM, and ANZ Royal Bank Cambodia. Owing to his profound professional experience, he is also the Vice President at AusCham: The Australian Chamber of Commerce in Cambodia.

Open banking is emerging as one of the most popular trends in terms of digital banking services in Cambodia lately, wherein the government of Cambodia has created numerous avenues to enable open banking. Some of these include data exchange across government ministries, creating opportunities for businesses to engage with open banking platforms and many others. Since banks now have data from the government in a faster and more accurate way, we are witnessing a host of new features being launched into the market, especially in the mobile banking area. Additionally, the Central Bank has been developing a lot of open banking capabilities which accelerate the adoption of person-to-person and retail payments across the country. Also, cybersecurity has been garnering a lot of focus in recent years from the banking sector in terms of staying secure from external attacks as well as diligent care of customer data.

Challenges in Digital Payments Migration
Given the increasing competition in the industry lately, one of the key challenges that most financial service companies face is to reduce their time-to-market. Also, with the ongoing digital revolution, customers today have a lot of choices in terms of availing any particular kind of service, pushing the banks to innovate and cater to their exact requirements. Additionally, the recent surge in digital adoption has created a huge demand for skilled software developers and other related manpower. However, there is a dearth of skilled talent in these areas, which is also posing a serious challenge to BFSIs today. To overcome this labor shortage, organizations must look within their company and identify areas where they can make more investments to upskill their existing workforce.

Cybersecurity Practices in Digital Payment Transactions
Cybersecurity has been one of the most discussed topics across the boardroom meetings in almost every industry in recent times, and BFSI is no different. Thus,

most BFSI companies today are investing a lot in educating and upskilling their employees on various aspects related to information security so that they are capable of identifying any malicious activity and immediately take necessary measures. Also, advanced techniques such as two-factor authentication are making mobile applications more secure and robust, enabling customers to make online transactions without worrying about the security of their data. Additionally, there are a lot of tools and technology solutions available in today’s market that banks can embed into their mobile apps to not only make them better protected but also gather information about recent attack patterns and treat vectors that cybercriminals are using.

To overcome the skilled labor shortage, organizations must look within their company and identify areas where they can make more investments to upskill their existing workforce

Strategies to Maintain a Competitive Edge
In today’s digital era, for traditional banks and payment providers to be competitive in the market, they need to develop a culture of change within their organization so that they can easily adapt to the evolving needs of the customers. For this, companies need to invest in soft skills training programs for their employees, identify customer pain points and expectations and accordingly offer solutions. Also, keeping customers as the core of organizational strategy helps the companies not only maintain a competitive edge in the market but also increase their customer satisfaction levels and enhance their brand image. While every organization has its own set of capabilities, there will always be a gap in their capabilities. Industry partnerships and collaborations play a significant role in not only filling this gap in skills and capabilities but building them over time in such a way that it benefits all the parties involved in the collaboration.

Future Prospects
The number of consumers adopting digital payments will no doubt continue to grow in the coming days as well. However, although the usage of cash will witness a significant reduction, it will continue to be used across many transactions and won't cease to exist. Currently, some parts of the industry are at a pivotal moment of change where most banks are deciding on whether to open more physical branches or reduce their existing numbers and invest more in their digital offerings and capabilities. Going forward, the convergence of digital and physical experience is expected to happen at an accelerated rate within the banking sector, wherein although most services will continue being available in the physical branches of the banks, they will be more digitized.