The threat that peer-to-peer lenders' lower cost structure and rapid decisions on loans will undermine big banks' profits and customer relationships is just one of several emerging challenges according to Pete Steel, executive general manager of digital at the Commonwealth Bank of Australia. And not one he is unduly concerned about.Steel told an audience of finance professionals and academics at Macquarie University Financial Risk Day on Friday that "the appetite for digital is doubling every year", and that he saw the emerging competition as coming not just from fintechs or the technology giants such as Google and Apple, but also from CBA's other banking peers.To which he added the digital environment more generally, including cybersecurity, a task that keeps over 100 people fully occupied at CBA, with a budget of A$100 million allocated."We have to learn to deliver more, sooner and quicker," Steel said, noting it was not just a matter of managing costs. He also pointed to privacy as a "really big emerging issue". "It's not just the loss of data, it's the identity theft goes along with that as well."We spend a lot of time and a great deal of money keeping our system secure. And we spend a lot of time thinking about who we partner with and where that data goes."Steel said how to partner with third parties to give them access to customer data in a way that is safe, "given all the safeguards that we are held accountable to by customers and regulators," was among the emerging digital challenges for banks."Screen scraping is another thing that we spend a lot of time thinking about - where customers pass over their banking credentials to a third party to let them access their banking details through a third site. We don't think that's appropriate is it compromises use and years of what we've been training customers to do to keep themselves safe," Steel said."That's emerging because there is some sort of need out there and customers are looking for better experiences."Nevertheless, CBA is learning to partner with fast start-ups, with the caveat that "we are protecting a very large balance sheet and they are trying to move quickly". In this regard, CBA is running a pilot program with sharing platform Airtasker to see if that is the type of role their customers expect it to play in the digital economy.Steel was at pains to emphasise this program was not a digital identity substitute, merely one additional piece of information to confirm the identity of a person on that platform in conjunction with other information on that platform. "It's more of a name check, to say 'Yes, there is a person with that name who has an account with the CBA'," he said.