Challenger banks are growing account numbers at astonishing rates. Unfettered by legacy infrastructure and able to leverage their agile, tech-centric cultures, they are able to create flawless digital experiences. And these experiences are what win them customers, with 43% of customers citing ease of account setup as their top reason for choosing a challenger.
Customer experience is starting to show concrete proof of its worth as a growth engine with banks ranked in the top 25% in terms of experience having meaningfully higher deposit growth over the past three years.
The challenge for most banks is that they’re not starting from a position of strength when it comes to customer experience. Also, progress in innovation is hampered by outmoded systems, product and data silos and risk averse cultures.
What needs to change in traditional banks?
Seen as a whole picture, the change is a far reaching one. Traditional banks need to completely change the way they engage with their customers in the digital space, communicating with each customer as an individual at scale and across any channel with cross channel journeys being as seamless as those within a single channel.
The extent of this change can be hard to digest, so banks must first prioritise the improvement of the most important customer journeys and sub journeys, working to turn them into seamless, end-to-end digital experiences.
How can traditional banks make the change more easily?
Digital investment platforms are starting to be seen as the smarter route to innovating the customer experience. The platform approach offers banks ready-made digital banking capabilities that can be tailored exactly to their needs, providing the speed to market of an “out of the box” solution and the bespoke quality of a custom made solution built in-house.
With a digital banking platform banks can launch end to end customer journeys quickly, easily and affordably, providing experiences that will enable them to complete with the slickest challenger offerings in a matter of weeks or months as opposed to years. The platform approach also enables banks to create new digital offerings that work alongside their existing systems, with no need for massive overhauls of existing infrastructure.
An example of what a digital banking platform can offer is the launch of a fully digital customer onboarding journey that cuts down account opening time to around 10 minutes. The platform offers a number of embedded technology innovations to make the customer journey smoother. These include:
- Optical Character Recognition (OCR) to cut down on manual data entry from scanned or photographed documents
- Biometric identity verification
- Integrations with third parties to run KYC checks
- Automation to give instant decisions and account access
Digital banking platforms also hold the key to a swift, simple and budget friendly way to create seamless journeys across channels, known as omnichannel customer experiences. Omnichannel is not just about offering access across multiple channels: it’s about consistent customer service, regardless of the touchpoint where an interaction originates.
A digital banking platform can centralise customer interactions across multiple touchpoints and provide a 360 degree view of the customer, where they are a central hub to which all data flows.
When you partner with a digital banking platform provider, you do more than just buy in technology. You partner with an agile fintech team who are ideally positioned to assume responsibility for digital innovation, meaning that both your teams and theirs are given the opportunity to play to their strengths. This is a sure fire way of ensuring you are able to capitalise on the competitive advantage offered by innovating your customer experience online.
If you’d like to talk to one of our experts about what our savings and investment platform could do to transform the future of your bank, please let us know and we’ll set up a conversation with you.
