DIGITAL ADAPTATION OF THE BANKING SYSTEM OF UKRAINE: THEORETICAL FOUNDATIONS AND A METHOD FOR THE INTEGRAL ASSESSMENT OF BANKS' DIGITAL MATURITY

Abstract

Martial law, damage to energy and telecommunication infrastructure, and the accelerated alignment of national legislation with European Union law have substantially changed the conditions under which the banking system of Ukraine operates. Digital technologies have ceased to be a means of reducing operating costs and have become a precondition for maintaining the continuity of a bank's activity. The article aims to substantiate the theoretical foundations of the digital adaptation of the banking system of Ukraine and to develop a method for the integral assessment of banks' digital maturity suitable for application in a wartime economy. The study distinguishes three successive states of a bank's digital development: the digitization of data, the digitalization of processes, and digital adaptation. The latter is defined as a bank's capacity to reorganize its own operating model in response to external disturbances whose consequences cannot be predicted by linear methods. It is established that widely used international methods of assessing digital maturity measure predominantly the quality of customer service in peacetime and disregard the energy autonomy of an institution, the availability of backup communication channels, and the speed of data recovery after equipment failure. An integral index of a bank's digital maturity is proposed, combining four components: the level of internal process automation, the depth of data analytics in customer relations, the intensity of interaction with state electronic identification services, and the resilience of information infrastructure. The method of calculating the index is substantiated on the basis of range normalization of indicators and the weighted summation of normalized values, with weighting coefficients determined by the analytic hierarchy process. The scientific novelty of the results lies in the development of an assessment method that takes into account an institution's capacity to continue operating when equipment is damaged and power supply is interrupted. A specification is presented for further testing of the non-linear relationship between the level of digital maturity and a bank's cost-to-income ratio. The practical significance of the results lies in the possibility of applying the index by the National Bank of Ukraine when supervising the operational resilience of banks, and by bank management, for planning the sequence of digital transformations and substantiating the related expenditures.