The Entersekt blog.

If we were to assign 2020 its very own buzzword, it’d have to be “Coronavirus”. Yes, we’re all tired of hearing it but globally the impact of the outbreak has been immense – and it’s far from over. For e-commerce and digital banking, though, there has been an undeniable silver lining: an upsurge in online activity.

As consumers prepare for some of the biggest retail events of the year, this shopping season will deliver some firsts. Because of the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, physical stores will have to enforce social distancing and limit the number of feet through their doors. Frantic shoppers, wary to venture out in any case, will flock online to get their annual fix.

There are two central goals of PSD2: to protect the consumer by increasing the security of payment mechanisms, and to promote competition in the pan-European payments market. Unfortunately, SMS OTP technology falls short on both.

There’s no denying that the COVID-19 pandemic necessitated the accelerated adoption of mobile and online banking faster than anyone could have anticipated. Numerous studies have attested to this, for example, as of July 2020, 14.2 million Americans had selected a digital-only bank to be their primary account holder. That’s a 67% jump from January 2020.

The concept of gate-keeping access to digital services with a username and password may have been appropriate, and even good practice, in the early days of computing. However, in today’s world where people have hundreds of accounts, they tend to re-use one password for multiple accounts or outsource the job to a password manager service. And even if you do manage to create a complex and unique password for each account, and remember it at the time of login, there is still the all too common problem of data breaches.

The COVID-19 pandemic’s impact on the wealth management industry has been considerable. Plummeting markets and declining liquidity have exacerbated a decade-long trend of costs rising faster than revenues. Additionally, as lockdown restrictions came in, a key aspect of private banking – face-to-face consultations – were no longer possible, and at a time when customers were more in need than ever of the reassurance and up-to-the-minute, bespoke advice these provided.

Even before COVID-19 relegated us to our couches, digital banking was on the rise. But it was only at the height of the pandemic, when we had no other choice, that more of us started turning to digital-only channels, putting pressure on banks and other institutions to fast-track their pre-COVID digital strategies.

Digitalization of banking and commerce was progressing at pace before the pandemic, but COVID-19 catalyzed consumers and businesses to adopt digital services faster than even its greatest proponents had expected. Now, having become accustomed to this convenient way of transacting, most people are likely to continue with this new way of banking and shopping when life approaches something like normality.

Let’s get philosophical for a second, even at the risk of sounding unoriginal. Because, honestly, no-one’s gone on to say this better than Heraclitus himself once did: “Change is the only constant in life.”

In September 2018, CREALOGIX launched a digital banking authentication solution based on a mobile app-based push procedure from Entersekt. Since then, the SaaS application has been used over a million times