Do Traditional Banks Really Still Own the Customer Relationship?
Conversations and sessions at FinTECHTalents last month covered many hot topics, but one theme dominated: the customer relationship is at stake.
False comfort
Banks continue to draw a false comfort from retaining customer current/checking accounts, without realizing that data, engagement and monetization opportunities are seeping away to other players.
Despite many banks having already embarked on digital transformation projects and despite many having launched an array of fintech/tech partnerships and initiatives, more is needed for them to prosper in the digital era. During FinTECHTalents, Jim Marous put it frankly:
“Banks have willful blindness; they don’t realise that they are losing business. Just because bank customers don’t switch doesn’t mean that they love you.”
This ‘blindness’ comes from studying attrition rates which don’t show the bigger picture. Jim explains how this gives false comfort by talking about his own banking arrangements: “With my business bank, I still give deposits and get withdrawals, but most transactions are handled by PayPal, they understand my business intimately. PayPal can offer me a pre-approved business loan instantly. If I went to my bank, it would probably take me 4 maybe 5 days to get approval and that’s assuming that they will approve it at all. I can get this immediately from PayPal. My bank may have my business, but they don’t have my relationship.”
This view was further reinforced during the keynote session on Day 1 of the event when Aritra Chakravarty, Founder and CEO of Project Imagine and Dozens highlighted that:
”The number of customer accounts a bank has doesn’t reflect customer behaviour. People change partners more regularly than their bank; just because you have a large customer base it doesn’t mean that they are engaged and profitable.”
In short, then, for the incumbent banks, headline customer might hide the extent to which their business are being disrupted by new competition. So, what is needed for banks to truly engage with the millions of headline customers?
The engagement gap
“We spend 3 hours a day on our mobile phone. On average we look at our phones around 80 times. We scroll through 300 feet of news-feed every day, that’s the equivalent height of Big Ben!” said Russell Pert, Industry lead, Financial Services at Facebook on Day 1 of the conference before concluding:
“people want to do their banking through the services where they live their lives.”
The point being made here is a profound one. It is easier to embed financial services into a service where customers already have a lot of engagement than trying to create engagement in a banking channel. Think how many times you visit, say, WhatsApp (another Facebook property) compared to your banking app.
Also, where banks are using artificial intelligence (AI) to understand customers better, they’re often introducing more, not less friction into the customer relationship. As innovation and entrepreneurship professional at RBS, Roshan Rohatgi said in the Behavioural Science panel,
”Stopping a card transaction due to a possible fraud risk may protect the customer, but can lead to embarrassment and negativity with the bank.”
And it has never been easier to embed banking into other services. Open Banking opens up access to customer transactional data, creating a unique opportunity for third-parties not only to serve embed banking into their services, but also to do it more personally by meshing up contextual and locational data with bank data. As Bradley Leimer put it to us,
“The promise of open banking to a High Street bank is a degradation of their relationship with the customer. For a fintech, it’s an inroad into a relationship. For a tech provider, it’s a way to take more data in, understand and profile a customer better, and further entrench them into the ecosystem.”
So should banks despair? Not all, sometimes the answer is to go back to basics, rather than to try to emulate Facebook or WeChat.
Using digital to do banking better
Roger Vincent, Chief Innovation Officer at Trade Ledger pointed out there is a global funding gap of £1.2 trillion, defined as the shortfall between the capital SMEs require to grow their businesses and what they receive in lending, and that gap continues to grow.
The problem, says Roger, is that
“the economy is becoming increasingly intangible, but banks aren’t yet comfortable lending against these intangible assets, which requires them to capture and process new datasets in real time.”
But taking advantage of new datasets to get credit flowing to SMEs is exactly the kind of opportunity banks should be seizing with digitization.
Likewise, helping to create financial services that are better moulded around people’s changing lifestyles is another major opportunity. As Dharmesh Mistry put it, the way to create a deeper relationship with customers is give them “everything they need for a given context”.
He used the example of a freelancer: banks should adapt their own services, for example, by giving access to credit to top up volatile incomes, but in addition they should provide all of the ancillary services that a freelancer might need such as filing taxes, raising invoices, submitting expenses and so on.
This might entail a move to more of ecosystem-based business model, but platforms are emerging to facilitate these models. Trade Ledger is building a platform that could easily facilitate this, while Bud is doing this now. As James Perry, Head of Client Delivery at Bud, says:
“We open the platform where banks don’t have to do procurement for 8 to 10 providers, you only have to do it with Bud. We open the door to a network and allow lots of different providers to come “
Helping customers to make better decisions
But going back to basics even further, the route to more meaningful customer interaction may lie simply in helping customers to make better decisions.
Banks sit on rich datasets, but when they’re used well (if at all), it tends to be in the pursuit of up-selling and cross-selling. In part the issue is that customers might get the wrong products for their needs and also that they might find it intrusive — as Poojya Manjunath from Lloyds Banking Group said within the Behavioural Science panel,
“when a personalised message forces the client into a transaction/money exchange that’s when the customer will often back off.”
But the issue is bigger, the products might end up reinforcing bad behaviours.
Like the Facebook algorithm that serves us up more of the content we like, serving up more loans to an over-spender can perpetuate their problems and amplify the cognitive biases from which we all suffer. Instead, banks should help customers to understand themselves better and help them to achieve their long term goals.
Dr. Peter Brooks, Chief Behavioural Scientist at Barclays, put it well on the Behavioural Science panel,
“If our customers aren’t managing their money well, it is our job is to help them to manage it better. The result is that they will become better customers and their lives will improve and they will become stronger economically which helps both banks and society as a whole.”
And he went on to say that the problem often sets in with the product design, “the typical focus of a product manager is about delivering the end product and launching, rather than how to design it in the first instance. You need to get the design right first. Look at the customer journey, look at how the customer uses the product and ask if it encouraging positive behaviours.”
In terms of using data to put the customers’ needs first, Pol Navarro, Digital Director at TSB, used a good example from the SME space.
“There are lots of opportunities to anticipate things. Imagine with Open Banking where you can easily get data from all your accounts wherever they are, and combine that with your accounting software in the cloud, banks can easily help customers predict their cashflow, for example, saying that in two weeks there are all these payments coming but you do not have sufficient funds and therefore something must be done whether it be taking out a loan or bringing money in from another account to avoid an impact in your cashflow.”
The imperative to make this shift to helping customer make better financial and commercial decisions was underlined starkly by Bradley Leimer, who sees it as the existential challenge:
“Banking is an industry today that continues to take profit rather than give profits. It’s a value proposition that’s about how much value I can derive from you rather than how much money I could derive for you. That to me is the biggest opportunity — along with a long term view — that the industry needs to shift or it will completely give up and recede the relationship entirely to big tech and a series of platforms that banking itself will no longer be a part of.”
To sum up…
Any bank looking at headline customers numbers and giving itself a pat on the back should be wary that disruption continues to abound. There remains the big threat, heightened since the advent of Open Banking, that the large technology platforms will eat their lunch.
But the challenge seems to be at one more profound and simpler. Banks more than anything need to change philosophy by promoting customer need above their own. Practically, this means using data to help customers understand themselves better and, in turn, helping introduce them to the services they’ll need and the banking services to support it. Trying to be Facebook won’t work, just try to be better banks.
To see the full interview with James Perry from Bud click here.
