Use Data and Next-Gen Tools to Drive Digital Banking Transformation
As the pace of change in the banking industry accelerates, organizations are embracing the need for digital transformation initiatives that enable real-time delivery of insight and process improvements at speed and scale.
The banking industry is changing and evolving at a pace never before seen through the use of technology. While always a driver for progress, the adoption of new advances and practices has enabled financial institutions to connect and operate faster and more efficiently than ever before.
It’s a very exciting time to be a participant in these changes, but effectively understanding the value and impact they can have is critical to achieving successful digital user experiences. Financial institutions in particular are at a crossroads, where the convergence of technology and design can create new opportunities for refining and managing internal processes – providing exceptional user experiences for both staff members and customers.
Banking customers’ expectations have shifted as their experiences with other aspects of technology present new ways to interact with the world around them. These increased expectations are tied directly to how financial institutions need to think about their daily operations and interactions with customers on a global scale, with the financial services industry approaching a critical juncture in this progression.
Executives interested in delivering best-in-class services and experience need to focus their organizational efforts and continue to internalize a few important ideas for the coming year to best leverage an ever-expanding set of technology options. None of this is ‘breaking news’, but is worth another look as new trends continue to emerge, leading to additional decision-making opportunities.
Your customers are constantly interacting with technology. Mobile devices are never far from them, and when they are, they can simply issue a voice command to Alexa to take care of a pressing need.
Entertainment, social interaction, commerce, and every other facet of human life has moved into the digital realm, and the experiences delivered in these parallel verticals are setting a high bar for the financial services industry to meet. Fail to delight your customers and provide a seamless interaction, and they will gravitate away from your business and to a competitor without a second thought–and potentially engage in a social media negativity campaign, the outcome of which can never fully be known.
Traditionally, great digital customer experiences have not been at the forefront of financial institutions’ concerns. This is due to a primary focus on interpersonal relationships, but also stemming from the need to often support legacy systems that run operations that don’t provide the scalability or flexibility to grow robust user experiences and services around them. These systems have been focused on internal-facing metrics for success, and the cost for making changes – and potentially negatively impacting business – has been too high to warrant experimentation.
However, smaller fintech firms are disrupting the market through inventive ideas around finance and the creation of great experiences that map directly to customer expectations. Stored value and payment services such as Venmo have been able to capture significant mind share by developing interactions for users that replicate the ones they perform the most – making it as easy to make financial transactions as it is to interact with friends on Facebook.
To keep pace with this kind of shift, financial institutions need to look to embrace those experiences and interactions that mirror the intuitive, familiar, and effortless usage patterns of other mainstream digital products. Examine your own digital properties and start to think about the kinds of subtle changes that might align them more closely to other well-known tools and experiences. Simplify and make interactions more intuitive.
