Financial Services

Transforming digital customer experience: five leading trends in banking and fintech

On what basis would you recommend a bank to anyone? Most likely, the premise would be your personal experience with the bank — how efficient and fast the onboarding was, how promptly your queries were answered, how user-friendly their digital platforms are, and other such considerations. This highlights the importance of customer experience (CX) and why investing in it is crucial for banking and fintech.

Banks and financial institutions around the world are examining their current products and services to determine if greater levels of customer-centricity and personalisation can be achieved, especially in the digital space with multiple touchpoints like online banking and digital interactions (emails, chatbots).

If you are an institution wanting to make a change, here is a compiled list of top banking CX trends that can help you get started.

Five trends transforming digital CX

Chatbots that deliver quick, real-time responses

There are many routine questions — such as how to upload documents online, or how to get a passbook — that customers want answers for. Or they would like information on the available account balance or outstanding credit card balance. Banking and finance sectors have many such routine queries that can be managed without human intervention.

Support chatbots are the ideal way to answer or direct customers efficiently. Moreover, chatbots can do so instantly, and be available round the clock.

Cross-channel synchronisation and support

Financial and banking institutions have made it possible for customers today to engage with them whenever, wherever, however — via the internet, mobile, or a physical branch. All services are available through all channels to deliver an excellent CX.

With so many different touchpoints, it is important for data to be synchronised across them all. An omnichannel platform makes this possible in real-time. For example, an online fund transfer done via a mobile device should reflect immediately on the bank’s internet banking platform. To meet the high demands of today’s customers, banks must become agile* and up their ante to provide a seamless and integrated digital experience.

Leveraging AI, ML to augment CX

HSBC, the first major retail bank in the USA, deployed “Pepper”, a social robot in 2018. It is a proactive kiosk, intended for use at retail, hotels, and banks. “Pepper” is an example of AI’s futuristic capabilities for the banking sector.

Significant AI-driven impacts have been felt in the finance sector, including:

• Faster and more efficient banking business processes.
• Improved activities, e.g., better loan adjudication.
• Generation of new value propositions by using market utility data and predictive analytics.
• Devising new digital advisory and product customisation functions.

There are more areas in financial services that can benefit hugely from leveraging AI:

• Automotive claims handling — For e.g., car insurance claims could be fulfilled and paid within a couple of days with just a photo of a dent on the car.
• Compliance with regulations — Banking is a highly regulated industry, requiring banks to comply with several regulations such as privacy, anti-money laundering, fraud prevention, etc. Non-compliance with rules can result in heavy penalties. AI virtual assistants can be of great assistance in this situation and monitor transactions, customer behaviour, compliance, and regulatory information. This will ensure that there is a check on potential non-compliance liabilities.
• Interacting with establishments — Using NLP and speech recognition to interact with financial institutions.

Focus on transparency and security

Transparency and security are key indicators of trust. Institutions that honour these also happen to be the best-performing ones. Once trust is built, it is easy to gain loyalty.

Data security has always been a key element in banking and financial services. Without customers feeling secure about the information they share (pictures, signatures, biometrics), banks would not be able to build trust. Furthermore, customers want total transparency about how their data will be preserved.

Some ways to address privacy concerns are by being open about service policies and terms and conditions (T&C), and detailing security features. This way trust is protected and good CX is assured.

Proactive customer support

With the use of a powerful tool like advanced analytics, along with a variety of channels which are at their disposal, banks can provide real-time customer support. In today's world, banks must do more – they must offer smart recommendations to help customers avoid financial pitfalls. This will have a positive impact on customer satisfaction and loyalty.

Conclusion

It can’t be stressed enough how critical CX is in digital banking and fintech. According to a survey by Gartner, 81 out of 100 companies compete mostly based on CX. Apart from being a key competitive differentiator, CX has the power to improve customer retention too.

Today’s customers are smart, know what they want and that there are options. If they are dissatisfied with only one bank, there will always be some other that can meet their expectations.

Ultimately, it just boils down to how they feel when they use a bank’s services. A positive experience facilitates a bank’s growth, increases revenue, and upholds its reputation.

* For organizations on the digital transformation journey, agility is key in responding to a rapidly changing technology and business landscape. Now more than ever, it is crucial to deliver and exceed on organizational expectations with a robust digital mindset backed by innovation. Enabling businesses to sense, learn, respond, and evolve like a living organism, will be imperative for business excellence going forward. A comprehensive, yet modular suite of services is doing exactly that. Equipping organizations with intuitive decision-making automatically at scale, actionable insights based on real-time solutions, anytime/anywhere experience, and in-depth data visibility across functions leading to hyper-productivity, Live Enterprise is building connected organizations that are innovating collaboratively for the future.