Covid has changed nearly everything, and financial services are no exception. The way end users conduct their transactions has evolved significantly. Legacy institutions need to evolve to stay current, and that creates exciting new opportunities, according to Galileo Financial Technologies CEO Derek White.

”Pre-Covid, why would a human walk into a physical branch, a physical office, a physical retailer? Is it because they wanted to? Or is it because they had to, because (services) weren’t digitally available?” White asked during a session at the recent Money20/20 Europe conference in Amsterdam.

With the ability to serve customers through digital channels now merely table stakes for financial services providers, White said the emphasis now has shifted to improving the backend systems and technologies that undergird those digital offerings. “Over the next seven to ten years, there’s going to be massive investment in the below-the glass-technologies to enable differentiation, automation, readiness and experimentation,” White predicted.

With increasing end-user demand for faster and more sophisticated financial services interactions, such “below-the-glass” capabilities are becoming the key competitive criteria via which providers seek to stand out from the pack amid the new, digital-centric financial services landscape.

“The first phase was making everything available digitally… But where we see the massive opportunity right now–and it’s changing business models–is the intelligence of the interactions,” said White.

Appearing alongside White, Miguel Santos, CEO of digital core banking platform provider Technisys–which recently was acquired by Galileo parent company SoFi Technologies–noted that bolstering data-related capabilities will be a critical factor in enabling providers to drive more intelligent interactions by better understanding their end users’ needs and being able to predict future behavior.

“There’s a limit of what you can do without actually exploiting data, without understanding what your customer will do without predictive behavioral analytics, personalizing products, hyper personalization. Where does this happen? In the backend,” said Santos.

Advances in technologies including cloud computing and machine learning have helped make it possible for financial service providers to do more than ever with the trove of user data to which they have access–and to do it with minimal human interaction needed on the part of the provider, Santos added.

“You make it intelligent, and then you make it autonomous,” White echoed. “That’s where we’re headed.”