If you read the banking press two or three years ago, attended any of the major conferences, took part in webinars, meetups and the like - you’d have found that most of the commentary and quotes were about customer-centricity; UX, UI. The experience.
But lately, there has been a noticeable and sad decline in this trend, towards naval-gazing. Once more talking about ourselves as an industry, our issues, our challenges, Open Banking, the API-economy, PSD2, GDPR. Declining revenues, revenue opportunity, compliance, regulation, blockchain, AI, machine learning, etc. All worthy causes, granted, and all causes that should have a happy outcome for the customer. But it’s as if that happiness is a fortunate by-product, rather than being the raison d’être.
What’s caused the sea change?
One word. Fear.
Fear of the cost of compliance, fear of declining revenues from services that don’t any longer pass muster compared to competitors. Fear of being disintermediated, fear of change, fear of failure.
There’s a fear culture and more often than not, fear paralyses our ability to act. It makes us curl up, become introverted and focus in on ourselves.
A Reward for the Brave?
For those who are prepared to feel the fear and do it anyway, there are huge rewards to be found. Leading Digital banks like DBS and Citi have not forgotten their customer and it’s at the heart of everything they have done within their organisations to change the way they operate; the way they now are.
Citi, Euromoney’s ‘Digital Bank of The Year’ - under the guardianship of Stephen Bird and Citi FinTech’s Yolande Piazza - are an excellent example. Take a single mundane feature – that I know from my own experience banks are fearful of introducing for fear of lost revenue. This feature that gave 1 million Citi customers peace of mind and saved the bank money. The ability to switch on and off your card if you’ve mislaid it. As Bird says “… previously that would have been 1 million phone calls, hundreds of thousands of newly minted cards ... and FedEx costs for despatch – often abroad” only for most of the mislaid cards to have been found an hour, a day or a week later.
The point is, they took the leap, faced the fear and found that it was rewarded because it was the right thing to do for the customer. Increasing customer loyalty and actually driving down their own costs at the same time.
So, why are most banks finding it so hard?
Digital Transformation has become so all-encompassing that it is hard to see the wood for the trees. Every bank is under pressure from regulators, boards, investors and customers to transform itself. So much so, that it seems paltry – pathetic, even - to start with a single useful feature. But those banks who can start with a single problem and solve it will gain increased confidence in being able to tackle the challenge of digital piece-by-piece. I've talked before about how it becomes infectious. Other parts of the bank start to hear about how they ‘did a Tesla’ in Mortgages, in AML or in Initiations - and want to try this new way of working for themselves. And that’s how organisational change is achieved. Through small movements on the ground that start to show the way forward for everybody else. Those movements though, must be customer focused - for there is no success in achieving a prettier process if the human being at the end is still frustrated by the outcome.
Of course, focus on compliance with regulations put in place to protect customers. But go the extra mile and make it mean something to the customer – let them see a benefit. Make Open Banking more than a couple of accessible-when-authorised API's. Provide a service on top that benefits the customer. Be the company to whom that customer remains loyal. Make the small changes that really matter to them and the rest will follow on. Digital Transformation is not a race to the finish, for there is no finish. It’s a perpetual commitment to meeting and exceeding customer expectations.
A happy customer will not leave you, even if you do still run the odd unseen database application somewhere on an AS/400!
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