ABSTRACT
The technology development in the Financial Technology (“FinTech”) triggers the technology innovation and digital disruption in the financial services sector, particularly in the banking industry. New business models, products and services are becoming prevalent, and the global banking landscape has been significantly transformed. Besides, an increasing number of FinTech companies and startups have offered customers a wide range of financial services that were once almost exclusively dominated by the banks. The future of banking is full of opportunities and challenges.
This qualitative research and comparative case study have been conducted to figure out how digital disruption and technology innovation is reshaping the way that financial services are constructed and to analyze how global outstanding digital banks respond to the digital transformation strategically. Based on the P.E.S.T. model, three technological critical success factors have been chosen to identify different types of transformation strategy in the banking industry. The P.E.S.T. model has been building around the different macro-environment in the three countries (the US, Singapore, and China). The results of this paper show that except the macro environment backgrounds, the technology developments in mobile networking, social platforms, and data analytics on the cloud played as the driving forces which significantly determine strategy success. Further, the research provides critical thinking on how open banking platform with APIs will help incumbents to attract and retain customers, especially for the increasingly digitally savvy customers by integrating data-sharing and seamlessly connection.
Key words: Digital banking, Digital disruption, Open banking, APIs, Strategy response

TABLE OF CONTENTS
Chapter One Introduction 1
1.1Research Background 1
1.2 Motivation and questions 1
1.3 Research Methodology 2
Chapter Two Literature Review 3
2.1 The evolution of banking and challenges 3
2.2 Digital disruption in the banking industry 6
2.2.1 Three Critical Driving Factors 7
2.2.2 Opportunities and Challenges 9
2.3 API based Open banking 10
Chapter Three Methodology 12
Chapter Four Research Finding 14
4.1 The United States of America 14
4.2 Singapore 18
4.3 The People’s Republic of China 21
Chapter Five Discussion 23
5.1 Comparison of three Banks and Markets 24
5.2 The relationship between incumbent and new entrants 26
Chapter Six Conclusions and Limitations 28
References and Sources 30

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