COVID, Customers, Competitiveness and the trouble we’re in

COVID is driving key threads of the economy into significant trouble – credit over-leverage, employment, and the decline of consumer purchases, a massive wave of rent defaults, and exploding debt for the rest of us will undermine the capital food chain and push multiple industries in existential trouble. This is not 2008/09. Multiple industries are in stress; stimulus has been poorly used, and the potential contagion from credit default to liquidity stress is not understood nor prepared for. But it has repercussions that will see multiple firms fighting for survival. Three areas of strategic focus we must all consider: with no historical precedent for understanding customer behavior, credit, liquidity, pricing, and risk decisions will all be challenging; an accelerated deployment of an enterprise digital strategy created by global "work from home" will force a new understanding of productivity and a resulting smaller organization; and the adoption of innovations in RPA, NLP, AI will not just be important, but a matter of success or failure for many firms. Simon Moss and Richard Stocks at Ayasdi will shoot the breeze on these challenges. Hopefully, bring a lighter perspective to what will be a dark time for the economy, and offer some suggestions on the hard but necessary decisions that the banking industry will need to address.