Gudni Thor Bjornsson
Customer Success Director
11.08.2025
The rise of agile neobanks, embedded finance, and AI-powered fintechs is capturing market share, especially among younger and underserved demographics.
At the same time, outdated infrastructure, sluggish innovation cycles, and regulatory complexity make it increasingly difficult for traditional banks to compete.
However, this doesn’t have to be the end of the road, but a great turning point.
Read on to learn more about each digital banking strategy.
To stay competitive and unlock new revenue opportunities, these are the strategies that you should prioritise.
| Extract full value from data and harness personalisation | Use AI, real-time analytics, and advanced data infrastructure to personalise products and communication | Enhances engagement, cross-selling, and customer loyalty |
| Adopt cloud-native and modular infrastructure | Implement a modular, API-driven, microservices architecture with cloud-native deployment for fast innovation | Boosts agility, scalability, cost efficiency, and rapid deployment |
| Invest in customer engagement tools | Use smart savings modules, loyalty programs, cashback, and AI-driven money management/budgeting tools | Drives acquisition, retention, and positions the bank as an advisor |
| Offer mobile-first, seamless UX | Prioritise intuitive, fast mobile and web platforms, frictionless onboarding and support | Meets customer expectations, boosts adoption |
| Enable frictionless onboarding and account management | Simplify sign-up, KYC, and account actions with digital ID, automation, minimal manual input, and 24/7 self-service | Reduces onboarding time, lowers abandonment, and increases satisfaction |
| Provide an omnichannel experience | Ensure a unified customer experience across branches, digital channels, and call centres | Reduces friction, improves satisfaction |
| Diversify Revenue Streams | Offer Banking-as-a-Service, open banking, payments innovation, value-added business services | Creates new income revenues, increases competitiveness. |
The first step toward digital growth is transforming your bank into a truly data-first organisation.
Transaction data forms the foundation of every financial institution’s operations and customer understanding.
Yet many banks struggle to unlock its full potential due to three core challenges:
Transaction data often arrives fragmented, inconsistent, and lacking categorisation or contextual enrichment. Without clean, structured data, deriving meaningful insights becomes difficult, and personalisation suffers.
When data arrives delayed, siloed, or proves technically difficult to access, its value diminishes. Without real-time availability, banks cannot make timely decisions, run predictive analytics, or deliver responsive customer service.
Even when data is available, banks often fail to use it, thereby blocking innovation in the form of smarter products, improved user experiences, or targeted financial advice.
In practice, turning into a data-first organisation means moving beyond siloed legacy systems and modernising your data infrastructure to support:
Real-time analytics,
Unified customer profiles, and
Scalable decision-making.
Cloud-native data platforms, API integrations, and robust data governance frameworks can help you achieve this.
As a result, you can gain more insights into customer behaviour, financial patterns, and life events as they happen, and not after.
Meniga can help you turn transaction data into real value for you and your customers by aggregating, consolidating, and enriching internal, open banking and third-party data.
Thus, you gain a 360-degree view of your customers’ spending habits and finances, enabling you to produce personalised offers. And speaking of personalisation, let’s check the next digital banking strategy.
Customers expect you to understand their needs and proactively offer tailored solutions, such as mortgage pre-approval, credit card upgrades, or savings goal prompts.
Using AI in banking and advanced analytics, you can segment audiences more intelligently, detect intent signals, and deliver relevant financial solutions at the right moment via the most suitable channel, such as a mobile app, email, or chatbot.
For example, you can offer:
AI models can interpret individual transaction patterns, detect income fluctuations, and understand spending behaviour to provide tailored advice.
If a customer receives a salary increase, the system could automatically recommend smart savings or investment plans.
Customers benefit from real-time categorisation of transactions and contextual nudges, such as alerts about unusual expenses, budget overruns, or duplicate subscriptions.
As a result, it makes financial management proactive and intuitive.
Using behavioural data and life event triggers, such as moving to a new city, having a child, or starting a business, you can suggest relevant products like insurance, home loans, or college savings plans at the exact moment the customer is likely to need them.
Did you know that with Meniga’s Insights, you can maximise the benefits of transaction data and
Analyse behavioural data to create ultra-specific customer segments, such as Likely to Invest or Starting a Family.
Leverage real-time events from any external or internal banking tool to ensure timely delivery.
AI can identify early signs of disengagement, such as reduced app usage, balance shifts, or dormant products, and trigger timely retention campaigns, offers, or check-ins via preferred customer channels.
Legacy IT infrastructure slows down innovation, increases operational costs, and limits the ability to adapt quickly to market changes.
In contrast, cloud-native infrastructure enables you to build, leverage, and scale digital services more quickly without the constraints of outdated systems.
Cloud-native architecture enables faster development cycles, automated scalability, and high availability.
In addition, instead of building all features into one monolithic system, you can use smaller modules that you can update independently.
It also means that you can avoid costly system-wide changes.
Modular infrastructure makes it easier to securely connect with external platforms and fintech ecosystems for embedded finance, payment innovations, or robo-advisory services.
With a modular approach, you can quickly introduce new offerings tailored to specific customer segments or geographies.
| Aspect | Modular banking systems | Legacy banking systems |
| Architecture | Modular, microservices-based, API-first | Monolithic, tightly coupled, often mainframe-based |
| Flexibility and agility | Highly flexible and customizable; easy to update | Rigid and inflexible; difficult to change or scale |
| Integration | Seamless integration with fintech, regtech, 3rd-parties via APIs | Challenging integration due to proprietary, closed systems |
| Time-to-market for new features | Fast due to independent modules | Slow due to large, complex codebases |
| Scalability | Cloud-native, auto-scaling capabilities | Limited by on-premises infrastructure |
| Cost efficiency | Lower IT spending with pay-as-you-go models | High maintenance and operational costs |
| Customer experience | Supports real-time, mobile-first, personalised services | Limited digital capabilities; batch processing orientation |
| Security and compliance | Embedded AI for fraud detection, real-time monitoring | Higher risk of breaches, slower to adapt to new regulations |
| Innovation capability | Supports composable banking for rapid innovation | Holds back innovation due to technical debt |
| Operational resilience | Fault isolation in modules enhances resilience | Monolith failures can cause system-wide outages |
| Development complexity | More complex to manage due to distributed nature | Simpler in concept but problematic at scale |
| Benefits | Faster product launches, lower downtime, better customer retention | Stability, but at the cost of agility and innovation |
Meniga offers modular, cloud-native, and event-driven architecture that integrates with both legacy systems and modern platforms.
It supports all deployment models, including on-premises, SaaS, cloud, and hybrid. This flexibility lets you modernise your digital environment without extensive infrastructure overhauls, ensuring a smoother and safer transformation process.
By leveraging transaction data and user insights, banks can design innovative, personalised loyalty programs that drive both acquisition and long-term engagement.
Key approaches include:
Cashback tailored to spending habits. For example, 5% cashback on grocery stores for customers with high monthly grocery bills.
Tiered benefits based on engagement level, such as premium support, lower fees, or travel perks for high-value customers.
Merchant-funded offers that are localised and dynamically triggered based on location, category, or transaction frequency.
Gamified experiences, such as financial milestones that provide tangible rewards.
Not only do the above approaches boost customer satisfaction, but they also create opportunities for partner-based monetisation.
This means that you can generate revenue while providing value.
Additionally, you can leverage intelligent money management tools to turn passive banking into active engagement:
AI-driven budgeting assistants that automatically track spending, recommend adjustments, and set realistic savings goals.
Behavioural nudges and alerts. For example, ‘You’re about to overspend on dining,’ or ‘You saved 20% more than usual this month. ’
Subscription management tools that identify recurring charges and let users cancel or renegotiate services.
Personalised financial health scores or digital coaching that adapts over time based on life events or habits.
Categorised transaction views and dashboards that help users visualise where their money goes
All of the above strategies help increase digital engagement frequency, giving you more opportunities to build trust, cross-sell, and reduce churn.
The richer the data for segmentation and personalisation, the better the marketing and product development.
In emerging markets and with younger demographics, mobile phones are the primary gateways to banking.
It is one of the main reasons why banks must design platforms that are intuitive, responsive, and always available, delivering complete banking functionality.
Customers want speed, simplicity, and security at every touchpoint, making clunky user interfaces, lagging apps, or inaccessible features deal-breakers.
What should you offer instead?
Progressive mobile design with consistent cross-device user experience.
Fast app performance with offline functionality or data-light modes in underserved areas.
Personalised dashboards that adapt to user behaviour and financial patterns.
Biometric login and passwordless security, reducing login friction.
Real-time updates, transaction alerts, and support notifications.
A strong mobile user experience directly translates to higher engagement, lower churn, and a better Net Promoter Score (NPS).
Mobile-first design also opens new growth channels, particularly among underbanked or financially excluded communities in developing markets.
To reach these segments:
Offer local language user interfaces and voice-enabled navigation.
Create low-fee or no-minimum accounts with transparent pricing.
Built for low-bandwidth environments, enabling access on older smartphones or slow networks
Integrate with remittance channels, micro-savings schemes, or mobile wallets popular in regional ecosystems.
Use behavioural data to provide insights that help users understand and build financial health, even without a banking background.
Portugal’s Crédito Agrícola, one of our clients, launched its digital bank, moey!, to provide its customers with an interactive banking experience and features to improve their financial health.
Thus, the app delivers several key features:
Automatically generates and manages financial budgets,
Provides flexible expense reports,
Helps customers create and manage savings goals, and offers alerts and incentives to meet those goals.
Here are the results:
More than 80% of transactions are categorised automatically
90% of transactions now happen through the app or by card
130,000 app installs in the first 6 months
More than 50% of moey! customers remain active users.
Unfortunately, digital growth is often lost at the very first step: the onboarding process.
Lengthy forms, document uploads, or branch visits often deter users.
How can you change the narrative? With:
Streamlined eKYC (electronic Know Your Customer) processes using document scanning, biometric verification, and national ID APIs.
Instant account opening that takes minutes, not days.
In-app tutorials and onboarding that guide users through features without overwhelming them.
Simple interfaces for managing cards, limits, loans, and bill payments, without calling customer support.
Self-service support tools, such as chatbots and smart FAQs, to reduce service costs and empower users.
To meet evolving customer expectations, banks must deliver a seamless, consistent experience across all channels: digital, physical, and human.
This requires a unified customer view that connects data and interactions across mobile apps, branches, call centres, and websites.
Customers should be able to start a journey in one channel, for example, by applying online, and complete it in another, such as visiting a branch, without repeating steps.
To do so, you should:
Use intelligent routing in call centres and live chat systems to ensure continuity based on past behaviour.
Maintain contextual memory across sessions (if a customer abandons a loan application online, follow up via SMS or call centre).
Implement omnichannel marketing automation to ensure promotions and updates are consistent and not repetitive across channels.
Offer channel choice for communication preferences.
Consistent communication and support, regardless of the channel, build trust and reduce frustration.
With integrated analytics, you can better understand behaviours and optimise journeys to improve both satisfaction and operational efficiency.
Your main goal here should be to deliver convenience, continuity, and value at every touchpoint.
Adopting a digital banking strategy enables you to embrace innovation, partnerships, and data-driven services, thereby opening new revenue streams.
Why not offer
Subscription-based financial planning tools for advanced budgeting, tax optimisation, and credit score monitoring.
Premium account tiers with exclusive features such as investment insights, wealth dashboards, or early access to salary
Embedded insurance offers for travel, mobile, or life insurance bundled into account packages.
Paid sustainability tools that help customers track and reduce their carbon footprint based on spending patterns.
In addition, by opening core capabilities through APIs, you can operate as a Banking-as-a-Service (BaaS) provider.
You can allow fintechs, retailers, and non-financial brands to embed financial products directly into their customer experiences.
Potential offers may include:
White-labeled accounts, cards, or loans embedded into third-party platforms.
Payment infrastructure or compliance-as-a-service modules for fintech startups.
Co-branded digital wallets or super-app integrations.
This model enables banks to move ‘beyond the branch’, monetising infrastructure and licensing fees while reaching entirely new customer segments without expensive acquisition costs.
Meniga provides digital banking solutions to over 30 large financial institutions across the world.
Our solutions help banks modernise their digital banking platforms by turning transaction data into hyper-personalised insights that enhance customer engagement and drive growth.
Our main focus is to provide you with tools to:
Boost customer engagement,
Promote financial health, and
Unlock new revenue opportunities through innovative digital banking experiences.
With Meniga, you can:
Integrate our solutions seamlessly with existing systems, elevating and modernising the digital environment regardless of the underlying architecture.
Segment customers by their unique spending habits, cash flow status, and financial goals
Create dynamic, context-driven content tailored to specific customer segments.
Build your own custom events from intuitive conditions and dynamic values.
Deliver financial insights and timely warnings to help customers manage their money and avoid fees.
Inspire customers to adopt healthy financial habits with personalised recommendations.
Leverage advanced analytics to offer the right products to the right customers at the right time and in the right context.
And the list goes on.
Enticed to know more?
Contact us today to discover how you can enhance your online and mobile banking environment with minimal investment and a quick turnaround.
How AI is Transforming Personalised Banking & PFM in 2025
Discover how AI in personal finance management empowers you to deliver smarter, tailored financial experiences that build trust and boost loyalty.
Read more 
Modernising Core Banking: A Complete Guide To Modernising Technology
Discover how core banking modernisation can boost innovation, cut costs, and future-proof your bank in today’s fast-paced digital economy.
Read more