In 2020, our hope is that financial services leaders and decision makers choose smart paths to grow and improve their business. Here are a couple resolutions to consider this next year in order to strike a balance between making yourself a customer-centric organization that also is keeping up with tech trends.
Accept that FinTech is a Core Part of Your Strategy
Let’s face it — FinTech is hear to stay, and tech’s influence on financial services isn’t going anywhere. With Big tech organizations like Apple and Facebook entering the financial services realm through offerings like credit cards and crypto-currencies, financial institutions need to accept and embrace the inclusion and disruption tech will cause. Most importantly, financial institutions need to recognize what they bring to the table — security, an existing customer base, compliance and consumer trust.
Simply put, technology is entering the financial services world because consumers have a higher demand for usability and customer experience than ever before, and smaller FinTech startups as well as big tech organizations feel they can improve the space. In order to keep pace, make sure your organization is using its assets in order to attract FinTech partnerships, be willing to change in order to enhance customer experience, and ride the wave of the future of financial services.
…But Say Goodbye to a Technology-First Approach
Importantly, sophisticated financial institutions are turning away from the idea of technology for the sake of technology. Too often this approach leads to an overwhelming amount of tech functionality that is unintuitive, whether it’s an overly complicated mobile app or a budgeting calculator that requires a lot of investment and gets minimal use.
Instead, financial institutions are focusing on a customer-first approach — by listening to what customers want, then building an infrastructure around their most important needs. Rather than providing every tool available, organizations should focus on nailing the fundamentals. Are online transfers easy and seamless? When a customer has an issue, are they able to get help? Is it easy for customers to make sense of their transaction history? By focusing on this approach, financial institutions can make sure the technology they invest in is truly working for the customer.
Additionally, a technology-first approach assumes that all-digital is the only strategy. While the amount of digital transactions are increasing, customers are finding branch experiences to be a major differentiator in dictating their preferred financial services organization. Couple this with the fact that Gen Z is surprisingly likely to visit branches, and executives risk losing out on this younger cohort by looking at things through a tech-heavy lens.
