Disruptive technologies are changing the way businesses operate, especially in the Banking and Financial Services sector (BFS).
Gone are the times when it took days to open a bank account. Now customer expectations have evolved. Everything should be accessible easily and only a single tap away. They want a simplified digital banking experience that is efficient, flexible, and one that supports them even when they are not digitally savvy. So, when it comes to BFS transformation, here’s what a customer expects:
Accessibility: Customers want quick, frictionless, and easy-to-use banking and financial services across multiple devices and platforms without delay.
Real-time support: Customers expect instant support like video chats, chatbots, and financial advisors for interaction during any issue.
Personalization: Customers seek personalized services that meet their needs. Banks can shape customer experience by identifying critical business drivers like customer experiences about a product or a service, historical customer data, etc., and delivering customized services based on them.
Data security: Consumers look for secure data practices with updated policies and regulations before subjecting their data to BFS institutions to avoid data loss and breaches.
Simplified processes: Customers want a swift response to their queries and even faster query resolution to their problems across different channels. Therefore, banks have to speed up their technology adoption to fulfill customer demands.
Intuitive UI/UX: Customers expect intuitive websites and apps that offer effortless experiences, making it easy for them to perform daily banking tasks.
Banking customers want personalized services, highly customized processes as per their needs, digital payments option, shorter delivery turnaround times, and round-the-clock real-time support and assistance. If traditional banking processes don't scale up to deliver these customer expectations, they expose their business to risks and redundancies. Also, operations and maintenance of these traditional systems were getting costly due to the limited support and knowledge that no longer justified the modern era's requirements. These factors led to the need for digital transformation through platform upgrades, rethinking banking architecture, and operation optimization to automate mundane tasks and speed up the banking processes. This will create a widespread impact across multiple channels.
The digital transformation of banks boils down to transforming their legacy system into a modular cloud-based solution. The market lists two main platforms:
Cloud-Native Platform: As customers expect rapid responsiveness, zero downtime, and innovative features, you need a platform that would empower your banking applications with speed, agility, scalability, and resilience. The cloud-native platform can build and run modern, scalable banking applications by reducing the development-to-deploy cycle time, in dynamic environments through containers, service meshes, immutable infrastructure, and declarative APIs. This platform is budget-friendly as it has a pay-as-you-go model, guaranteeing access to unlimited sources and charging only according to usage. JP Morgan, HSBC, Goldman Sachs, and Standard Chartered Singapore are some popular names that facilitated the transition toward the cloud.
Service-oriented Architecture (SOA): During the pandemic, there was a massive surge in online payments. This uncertainty intensified the need for operational efficiency for a smooth payment process, technology enablement to support data integration and messaging, growth enablement to develop products and services based on customer needs and requirements, and risk mitigation to develop systems that will be less vulnerable to interruptions. Banks need to grapple with a complex business environment to attain such flexibility. Enter SOA.
SOA helps to break down a complete application into reusable, open, standards-based services that can be repeatedly used by other internal and external applications within the organization. These are independent of the application and the business platform. With SOA, organizations can improve collaboration, and integration with existing applications, build new capabilities and drive innovation by assembling and reassembling these services.
Once you are through with understanding your legacy system and the strategy you require to transform, you can kick-start the implementation process.
There is constant pressure on BFS institutions to enhance their service quality levels for better reach, customer satisfaction, customer loyalty, and retention. As the banking industry is undergoing a radical shift to thrive in the digital banking landscape, it must provide quality services to sustain and retain healthy customer relationships. This can be done by leveraging some top disruptive technologies.
Data Analytics Tools and Machine Learning Algorithms: Extract important insights from customer data to build products, optimize banking processes, empower customers with more personalized services, and boost customer engagement with customized interactions.
CRM Technologies: Get a 360-degree view of your customers by gathering and analyzing data with CRMs. This data can be utilized by in-house financial advisors to provide tailored advice to customers at every point in their journey.
AI-Enabled Assistance: Reduce your customer's waiting time with quick personalized responses through AI-enabled chatbots. Also, you can employ AI-enabled virtual assistants to offer money management advice, thus enhancing the customer experience with your bank.
Paperless Processes: Increase efficiency and drive customer experience by reducing paperwork through digitization
Personalization: Initialize personal communications with customized conversation openings using sentiment analysis to detect emotions and respond accordingly. Also, offer hyper-personalization using predictive analytics, AI, and ML for sales and marketing messaging.
Advanced Analytics: Demonstrate your client’s value and deliver an optimized customer experience by offering proactive engagement and support through tracking their financial health, giving them financial advice, and recommending suitable solutions by accessing previously unattainable levels of client intelligence with advanced analytics.
Implementing these technologies will help banks to stay afloat in this competition with fintech which already has built a strong foundation for digital transformation and innovation.
One major benefit of good CX is greater customer loyalty they build with BFSinstitutions. This further drives customer retention.
Your customers are ready to invest heavily and pay for services that they feel the banks are providing value to them through personalized interactions.
But all these factors get justified when your customers get engaged with your bank. Customer engagement attracts customer loyalty and retention. And, this engagement is possible only via personalized services, interactions, involvement, feedback, and value-added services.
Before embarking on the digital transformation journey, banks need to understand each area of customer experience to strategize an effective and extensive customer engagement method. This will help banks and other financial institutions reduce gaps between customers and banks. Customer engagement with a financial brand will help deliver rich, intuitive user experiences across all digital touchpoints throughout a customer journey.
To seamlessly integrate emerging technologies, banks need to get in touch with a leading digital transformation company that will help in strategizing DX efforts and helps in delivering real value to customers.