Financial institutions are put under more pressure than ever before to perform across a wide variety of facets and offerings. They need to offer state-of-the-art technology, drive customer experience, become a partner that betters their clients’ financial lives, establish competitive offerings and evolve more quickly than ever before, just to name a few.
With so much responsibility, it’s easy to understand why financial institution executives and directors could become overwhelmed. When leadership is stretched too thin, it can sometimes be valuable to regroup and re-focus around a bank or credit union’s core offering: a safe yet accessible place for customers to maintain their wealth.
Specifically, by re-focusing around the central selling point of being a secure place for customers’ financial lives, banks and credit unions can drive other aspects of their organization. Consider the following:
Increasing Threat of Cyber Attacks
More than ever, financial institutions and tech organizations with access to customer data are subject to cyber attacks and data leaks. As such, organizations are taking increased measures to protect customer data, including adhering to new regulations around data storage, sourcing outside cybersecurity firms to protect their organization and investing time and energy in internal staff to work with customers and notify them of suspicious purchases.
Simply put, the core value of financial institutions as safe harbors of personal wealth is constantly being challenged, and by investing and protecting, your organization doubles down on this core value and is inherently important to your customers and the broader personal finance ecosystem.
Opportunity of FinTech Partnerships
If your organization has made the proper investments in cybersecurity, your leadership team will want to simultaneously protect customer data while utilizing it to its full advantage, making use of customer information to help promote products and services and better serve your customers.
This opens the opportunity for a FinTech organization to partner with yours and contribute to your overall value. In particular, when a FinTech organization has a reliable customer base (in the form of your financial institution’s customers) and a safe, secure space to work without concerns about customer data, they can help build out your organization’s more innovative features, finding ways to utilize customer data that delight them and make them more informed and sophisticated stewards of their own wealth.
Customers With Higher Demands
A final important reason to invest in your cybersecurity is because customers simply have higher demands today than in the past, and ensuring a safe space for their financial lives is assumed to be guaranteed and ensured by your financial institution.
When things don’t go right, customers may begin to question the efficacy of your financial institution and look elsewhere for more secure options. By creating a robust security system for your customers, you lay the cornerstone of your institution on which customer experience and tech innovation can thrive.
