Boring Banking Makes a Comeback with an Engaging Twist

In the aftermath of the financial crisis, some people have argued that “Banking should be boring.”

It’s a matter of how you define boring.

Boring is good if it means that banks adhere to post-financial crisis compliance regulations and reduce excessive risk-taking that has led to the crash. It’s bad if it means that banks are too afraid to change and innovate and instead, remain archaic, old-fashioned and cold, destined to slow atrophy.

Surveys regularly show that customers are rarely inspired by the service financial institutions provide. Today’s wired customers are simply not interested in boring banking. They want differentiation, personality, relevancy, engagement, educational experiences and even, dare we say, fun. They want faster, easier, and more accessible banking.

Banks could start gaining new customers by combining their process-oriented approach, which is and should be boring and safe, with a “digital mindset”, a 21st century, customer-centered approach, which is rooted in building trusted, personal relationships — through multichannel, multi-platform contacts with their customers.

In the Engagement Economy, banks must think about new ways to engage customers in meaningful ways, simplify complexity for them and make sure they walk away having learned or received something of value. This goes for students, senior citizens, middle-aged families, single parents and all other residents within banks’ communities.

Taking advantage of new technology, innovative banks are already delivering faster and easier engagement in compliance with standard regulations. Why?

• First, time to market and build costs have decreased dramatically thanks to advances in cloud-based services and technology.
• Second, it allows banks to free themselves from legacy infrastructure shackles and design human-friendly experiences with significantly lower run costs.
• Third, data-driven approaches are winning over customers through in-context education, assistance. Banks with a “digital mindset” are collecting and combining data to gain advanced insights (AI) that enable increasingly value-added services for customers. The data is used to understand the customer better and create new solutions, which brings in more data and means complete customer-centricity.
• Fourth, by leveraging technology, banks can better understand and manage regulatory processes and compliance processes and satisfy these requirements, while educating account holders about their options.
• Fifth, by using technology to support and empower employees (Staff augmentation), banks reduce employees’ fear of making mistakes and enable “shoulder-to-shoulder” experiences with a higher level of authority, transparency, and trustworthiness, which customers appreciate.

How to Humanize Digital Banking with Digital Assistants

In this E-Book, we take a look at six tips and examples that show you how you can use digital assistants to finally make banking engagements and experiences on digital channels human-friendly and less boring.

This article has been originally published at Guided-selling.org.