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This research presents a technology roadmap for social banking in Iran. Technology roadmapping is a tool for decisionmakers to identify, assess and choose between different strategic options to achieve the best technological objectives and help companies and industries to better understand their market and technological choices. As social banking is in its infancy, it could embody different aspects. Therefore, to be successful in field of social banking, banks should define specific capabilities based on their capacities to create their own model. A social banking roadmap provides a comprehensive plan for banks to design products and services based on their capacities and create required programs for their implementation and improvement.

This paper outlines the steps for creating a technology roadmap to develop social banking services of one of Iran’s private banks. Different methods were used to implement each step mainly based on expert panels and carrying out polling and survey research among banking and IT experts.

Technology roadmaps pay special attention to the challenges and the level of capabilities (both technical and social) to develop technologies and services specially for developing countries. The level of capabilities and absorptive capacity will determine the direction of technology development. Hence, banks should design their business plan and roadmap based on their background and capabilities, state of market, their status and goals. Policymakers should help increase cooperation, financial transparency, information and payments security via appropriate legislations.

The number of banks that have entered the social banking field is limited, and as a result, activities that have been carried out in this area in the country are limited too. Therefore, there was limited access to information as well as related studies. This research has tried to extract all the contents of the roadmap. Some sub-topics such as technologies have been dealt with to a lesser depth because of the complexity in identifying and assigning each of technologies to the service features. The technology roadmap experiences in the country are limited, and it was not possible to study the existing roadmaps with regard to their confidentiality. Developing a technology roadmap requires using expert panels and conducting multiple workshops with stakeholders from private sectors, universities and industries. In this research, because of low resources, the panels were confronted with limited continuous attendance as well as the accumulation of different stakeholders.

The research results provided strategies to inform, encourage and finance banks and other businesses to use social networks appropriately and effectively. These strategies can be categorized into the actions banks should take to expand social banking in the country and the actions policymakers should take into account in this regard. They are described as follows. Banks’ strategic actions include: provide training to staff on how employees should interact with customers on social networks encompassing general information and education about services, benefits and how to use social banking services for customers and society; motivate customer participation in social banking networks; convergence and integration of various offline and online channels; focus on core banking to expand competitiveness; pay attention to sustainable and green development in providing social banking services; analysis of the competitive environment in banking and other financial industries; designing a portfolio of social services for customers and allocation of budget and resources for development of social banking services and participation with other institutions and operators in providing financial and non-financial services. Policymakers’ actions include: adopt motivational policies for participation and use of social networks; education and awareness for different stakeholders; review and update the policies and rules of IT and social networks; establish appropriate laws to protect rights of employees and customers; invest in market and university studies on social banking and related services; develop policies for using in-house software and update rules and policies for small- and medium-sized enterprises.

Social banking is in its infancy in Iran and few banks deliver services of social banking in a limited scope. There is no technology roadmap for this purpose in Iran. This research presents a technology roadmap for social banking in Iran (and can be adopted for banks of other developing countries) and gives a comprehensive plan for banks to design products and services based on their capacities and create required programs to implement and improve them. The application of technology roadmapping in the field of social banking is new.