Changing client expectations for digital financial services

Jim Cairns
Aug 22, 2017 · 4 min read

A mobile app is not enough

If you are a banker, wealth advisor, mortgage broker or insurance agent at a larger firm, then you probably already offer a mobile app to your clients for some transactions, information and services. That app is sound digital strategy: According to MFour’s Millennial Insights Project report on money and finance, 61.2% of Millennials say they most prefer to do their banking with mobile apps. Meanwhile, using a website has lost some of its appeal: Only 12.5% of respondents cited desktop or laptop computers as their preferred interface for banking.

Even as mobile apps have vaulted past websites, though, a number of observations suggest that a mobile app is now no longer enough to satisfy your clients, differentiate your firm, and ultimately grow your share of wallet. This move is already on the minds of leaders at some big banks, such as Wells Fargo: “Customer expectations are shifting dramatically,” said Jim Smith, Wells Fargo’s executive vice president of virtual channels. “They are not being shaped by peer-competitor banks. They are being shaped by Apple. They are being shaped by Google. They are being shaped by Amazon. Too often, as an industry, we are not living up to expectations.”

What are these new customer expectations that Wells Fargo (who has a useful mobile app, in my opinion) doesn’t feel they are living up to? What are customers doing with Apple, Google and Amazon — and Facebook, Lyft, Airbnb and Breather, for that matter — that goes beyond the standard mobile app?

Conversing with others through messaging, primarily.

Messaging has become the most popular smartphone feature in the US, according to Fluent. Around the world, over 1.3 billion people use Facebook’s WhatsApp — some with their doctors, some with teams of colleagues and now some — outside the US — with their wealth advisor. Of consumers surveyed recently by Deloitte, 44% reported increasing their use of instant messaging this year. Exchanging texts with one’s driver through the Lyft or Uber app is now commonplace, and on the Airbnb mobile app, messaging is the single most-used feature, with more than 100k messages being sent on mobile per hour.

The tech giants tracked by Wells and other leading banks are furthering the trend. Apple’s new Business Chat in its Messages app connects consumers and businesses, as Amazon’s upcoming Anytime messaging app also undoubtedly will. Google now offers not one but at least three apps for text conversations, including Google Messenger, Allo, and Hangouts.

Why do consumers like engaging with businesses — including financial services firms — more through messaging? One reason could be that, while a mobile app enables a client to connect with a corporation, a messaging conversation goes further by connecting that client to a person at the firm. Granted, that “person” might sometimes be a chatbot, but so far consumers don’t seem to mind.

Regardless, what makes a text-based conversation even more compelling, whether with a friend or a business, is that it’s usually far preferable to a telephone call. Messaging doesn’t interrupt. It is asynchronous — it doesn’t require us to dedicate a chunk of time speaking back and forth on a voice line or listening to someone’s entire voicemail message. It’s fast- there’s no waiting for our counterpart to pick up the call or call back. It enables us to exchange content. It tracks and remembers for us: When messaging with a business, we have a transparent, searchable text record of the conversation with times and dates.

So aside from offering more of what customers want and expect, what does deploying 2-way messaging do for those running a financial services operation? Cost efficiency, for starters. The phone calls and face to face meetings between employees and clients is likely one of the most expensive non-digital activities in any financial firm. Unlike text messages, which can be captured directly into CRM and other systems of record, phone calls and meetings require time-consuming (and error-prone) manual data entry from employees. Capturing the text from messaging conversations also enables better compliance, along the lines of: “What exactly did I communicate to my client? Oh, here it is, automatically entered into my CRM as an activity, along with lots of structured metadata.” Finally, speaking of data, 2-way messaging with clients can build a much richer, more predictive profile on those you engage.

Aware of the advantages for both their clients and themselves, relationship managers and wealth advisors at a few banks are already messaging back and forth with their clients over WhatsApp, iMessage and SMS — with compelling results. It’s only a matter of time for this more customer-friendly, digital way of doing business to take hold across the consumer financial sector.

Eltropy Blog

Eltropy SaaS platform improves share of wallet, client acquisition and productivity of client-facing teams in banking and financial services industry.

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Jim Cairns

Written by

Head of Customer Success at Eltropy, Inc.

Eltropy Blog

Eltropy SaaS platform improves share of wallet, client acquisition and productivity of client-facing teams in banking and financial services industry.

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