By Ritesh Varma
As social distancing requirements loosen and as governments are trying to heal their economies, financial institutions must continue to provide a seamless digital experience as their customers will increasingly avoid visiting branches in favor of digital, touchless banking.
These adjustments and changes will not be temporary, and so banks need to ramp up their digital transformation initiatives to stay ahead of the curve. Financial institutions must adopt and prioritize the following to build a digital-driven organization:
Digital Onboarding
Online or mobile onboarding options are necessities in today’s digital world as customers prefer to go online for most banking activities, such as learning about products and services, conducting routine transactions, and soliciting support. A seamless digital onboarding experience can provide the following benefits:
Interactive sign-up, replacing long and detailed forms with a guided page-flow and reduced data entry
Integration of data and information across channels, such as social, mobile, PC, laptop, tablet, and more, for an omnichannel experience
An optimized customer journey, from prospecting, lead generation, and application processing, to funding
Digital Lending
Digitization of the lending process helps to manage high rates of application abandonment and reduce turnaround times related to loan disbursal. A loan origination solution for retail and commercial customers provides a number of benefits, such as:
Enhanced customer delight with omnichannel access to loan applications initiated from different devices
Holistic automation of loan disbursement by enabling effective decision making and abolishing manual intervention
Faster lending approvals by employing auto-decisioning to extract bureau data in real time
Wealth Management
Wealth managers must now deliver more personalized and comprehensive advice along with personalized portfolio management, real-time market updates, and on-demand reports that fully support customers’ investment decisions. Automation of the wealth management process provides:
Highly personalized, error-free reports and the ability to schedule reports for varied frequencies (daily, weekly, monthly, etc.)
Faster report generation by eliminating the need for multilevel approvals with pre-defined components and templates
Multilingual reports based on customer preferences, demographics, country, or community
Digital Process Automation
A robust intelligent process automation system (BPM) drives continuous process improvement and allows financial institutions to continually meet compliance requirements. BPM can be tailored to the unique needs of each financial institution and is scalable enough to accommodate hundreds of processes with billions of transactions. Intelligent automation has redefined the way financial institutions function, with:
Agile processes to enhance transaction volumes, reduce operational costs, improve profitability, and drive growth
Content analytics to deliver contextual content, relevant to the task being performed
A 360o view of customer information to deliver a best-in-class experience with timely and proactive services and responses
Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning
Artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) play a crucial role in helping banks to understand customer behavior by leveraging their transactional and other data sources. AI and ML can assist customer service employees by delegating basic requests, like updating personal details, to chatbots and reserving more complex problems for human workers, who can focus on delivering phenomenal customer service. Implementing AI and ML has the following benefits:
Increased operational efficiency and reduced costs for greater profitability
Personalized messages based on customers’ demographics and previous interactions
Detection of anomalous spending patterns and a reduction in credit card fraud resulting in increased customer security
In Conclusion
Now, more than ever before, financial institutions must balance their customers’ dynamic needs and the demands of an increasingly digital world by prioritizing new-age technology and complete automation. Especially during and after the COVID-19 pandemic, customer loyalty will be extremely affected by how financial institutions respond. By innovating and investing in upgrading their technological infrastructure, financial institutions can drive growth and customer satisfaction.
A strong commitment to digital transformation in the short term will enable financial institutions to future-proof their operations, preparing them to serve customers post-pandemic, and beyond!
The author of the article is the Global Head- Business Solutions and Consulting at Newgen Software.
COVID pandemic has accelerated the digital transformation not just in Finance or banking but in every sector. I honestly think that this sudden acceleration needs much more. For example, many industries don’t have access to a good network that can support their future expansion plans.