Perspective

Enable a digital-first consumer banking experience

Define a strong foundation for digital growth

Published: January 27, 2022

The “digital first wave” that started well before the pandemic is turning out to be table stakes for financial institutions. With consumers preferring digital channels to perform more and more banking operations, banks are forced to reshape their business model to extend a superior banking experience to online and mobile channels. 

The casualties amid this disruption may be the traditional, legacy banks.  As Fast Company reports, McKinsey estimates that legacy financial brands will see profits decline 20% to 60% by 2025. PWC predicts that by 2030, we could see the end of traditional legacy banks altogether. Hence, legacy banks need to quickly transform their digital platform landscape and embrace solutions to deliver a personalized omnichannel digital experience, keep customers engaged, drive new prospects, and clock a growth in sales.

With that, the million dollar question becomes - How can financial brands young and old better align with consumer needs and create a more personalized, curated, and meaningful digital experience for each customer?

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Drive and optimize financial services ROI through plug & play, innovation-driven engineering

Today, the way consumers shop financial services has changed forever, making financial institutions rethink how to personalize engagement and the customer journey across multiple devices and platforms. A unified omnichannel experience will drive greater customer acquisition, service, and retention. In order to enable such a transcending experience, it is essential to implement a digital platform that is agile, componentized, and integrated with a heterogenous technology stack. Financial brands need to think "outside the box" about everything "in the box" – marketing, sales, product development, and service strategy.

Picture a perfectly layered tiramisu – individual ingredients are great, but the magic occurs only when you bring in all the elements in the right proportions, built on the perfect base. Similarly, a customer experience strategy needs to be the perfect alignment of all channels and businesses. 

The evolution of cloud-based marketing and engagement tools has made executing customer experience strategies a lot easier today. With these tools, banks and wealth management companies can personalize, automate, and manage marketing content and assets driven by the customer journey and the value gained through all engagement phases; move from reactive engagement to proactive, customer-centric engagement across all channels; and build a world-class, frictionless experience that delights customers. Organizations need to leverage data to better understand and refine the transitional journey of customers and drive measurable business value and ROI for the firm. They also should focus on fostering a world-class digital team by establishing digital centers of excellence and best-of- breed tools and processes shared across lines of business.

To drive efficient technology utilization, a digital platform like this will need an omnichannel layer with reusable components/templates and third-party integration services. This will enable the plug-and-play, nimble experience financial institutions and their customers expect today. In the development process, it’s important to consider the following: 

  1. Compliance with accessibility guidelines under section 508, WCAG, and SEO standards
  2. A mobile app foundation framework to rapidly transform mobile apps experience
  3. Customer 360° view to better target existing and potential customers
  4. Insights-driven digital marketing to drive personalized real-time offers and brand loyalty.
  5. Real-time analytics to deliver tailored upselling and cross-selling promotions

Fuel your transformation faster

The rollout time for building a website, mobile app, and branch kiosks experience that sells can be anywhere from 10-14 weeks to over six months. Leveraging proven, cloud-based customer experience tools will likely accelerate implementation as wells as ROI. By focusing on  customer journeys, a portfolio of digital banking services can include:

Digital customer onboarding

Say goodbye to long paper forms with the quick and easy onboarding process that helps save customers’ valuable time.

Digitization and omnichannel

Are your forms only compatible with desktops? Omnichannel digitization ensures that all screen sizes and devices are compatible with your application forms to avoid any inconvenience to the customer. 

Digital self-service

Omnichannel portals and mobile solutions enable self-service options for customers and employees. 

Unified employee desktop app

Leverage the service to build a unified desktop solution with supporting applications, including 360° views for customers and employees, relationship managers, wealth managers, etc. 

Digital marketing

Display personalized real-time offers and analytics to deliver tailored upselling and cross-selling promotions.

It is true that in the digital age, many financial brands may get left behind. Ultimately, it will take more than a cloud-based digital strategy to compete. Financial institutions must not only procure the right products and services and align the right people and processes, but develop an agile, innovative mindset. Maybe even a maverick mindset. Like that of the late great Steve Jobs. 

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