The digital banking customer of today

By Neil Murphy, Global VP at ABBYY

The digital customer of today has certain requirements when it comes to banking: services must be readily available, an easy to access bank account and a smooth application process. With speed and simplicity as a key focus, offering traditional financial services is no longer an option. It’s no surprise, therefore, that Capgemini found that customers prefer Big Tech firms such as Google, Microsoft and Facebook for their banking needs due to ease of use, faster service and low-cost offerings.

But all is not yet won for these tech giants. No matter how hi-tech the front end is, if these Big Tech firms haven’t got their back-end processes in order, they too could crumble under the pressure. And with legacy banks starting to wake up to the world of innovation, the speediest, simplest option might not always be the tech giants from now on. So how can the incumbents of the financial services industry ensure this happens?

Traditional banks versus tech giants

Today’s consumers live fast-paced lives and their demands in banking reflect this. They want technology that provides them with a digital experience that makes their lives easier – helping to make decisions faster and achieve more from the day. But while customers are increasingly becoming more digitally savvy, many still place importance on human contact at their local branch or with their bank advisor by phone. YouGov found that almost a quarter of Brits still manage their money by popping into their local bank branch. So, banks will need to master the balancing act between digitalisation and personal customer service.

Banks have to reinvent themselves in some way and find a way to position themselves amongst the fintechs and the Big Tech companies in the age of digital transformation. But this is no new fact, the banking industry have experienced a wealth of innovative solutions to constantly better support their customers, from ATMs to mobile banking. Whether it is account opening, loan applications, payment processing, or any of the thousands of other possible processes, technology is the missing link – a sure-fire way to win new customers and keep existing ones

Big Tech giants are not sleeping on this innovation wave and are making banking available on their platforms as one of their many functions. As customers place more and more trust in these large corporations, traditional banks should take them seriously as new competitors.

The correct use of data is crucial

Traditional banks hold vast amounts of data from their history of being the primary brand for customers. However, all this data is meaningless if they are unable to get insights from it.

Neil Murphy

To do this, banks must ensure all data is structured and that the insights gained can enable a 360-degree view on customers, to help them understand what they want from their bank. Banks need to overhaul their processes from the ground up. They need to be able to identify the bottlenecks and blind spots in every engagement with customers – a difficult task without the right technologies in place.

Process intelligence gives banks the tools to analyse less structured processes, identify opportunities for improvement, and increase both the speed and accuracy of executing processes. When banks use advanced platforms that both understand content (including unstructured content such as e-mails, application forms or pay slips) and detect behavioural changes (whether it is customer behaviour or operational behaviour), they can identify factors that delay customer service response times, service delivery and even product innovation, and target them precisely here.

360 view to improve CX

The financial industry is extremely process-centric. Process data often spans multiple systems and across complex workflows, making it more difficult for banks to understand what their processes actually look like in their current state. To combat this, banks can implement process mining tools to identify, monitor and analyse a company’s workflows in all departments and systems and provide a complete overview of the process flow in real time.

With the right digital intelligence tools, banks and financial service providers can therefore obtain a complete overview of their end-to-end processes. Thanks to process intelligence and analysis, sophisticated insights are gained from the data, which show exactly how each individual process is running and where bottlenecks exist. In addition, data from past and current performance can serve as a guideline for necessary measures and for predicting future performance.

In order to meet today’s requirements of the digital bank customer and to compete with the large technology companies that are becoming more and more established in the financial sector, the traditional bank must embrace digital transformation and adopt solutions with digital intelligence.