Experience, Compliance, and Innovation: The Power of a Single Platform Experience

During my 20-year career in global banking, I’ve had the opportunity to help transform the operating technology of major banks in the US, Hong Kong, UK, Canada, India and the UAE. Now in Sydney, six months after my big move and new role as nCino’s Executive Director – Australia and New Zealand, I’ve realized that no matter where banks operate, their priorities are the same – creating an amazing customer and employee experience, while improving operational efficiency. I believe the best way to accomplish those goals is through the power of a single platform, which can help banks improve experience, ensure compliance, and embrace innovation.

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Experience: Serving individuals and businesses

In an ideal world, all customers should have the same great banking experience, regardless of line of business or channel. In reality, customers in Australia and New Zealand are seeing stark differences between consumer and business lending. In an economy powered by small businesses, the person who owns a business is just as likely to come to your institution for a mortgage. This creates a huge opportunity for local banks.

As the daughter of a small business owner and the granddaughter of a cattle rancher, I’m a big fan of treating smaller commercial customers as individuals – not as a set of transactions or products.

When banks have a system that touches all relationships, products, and business lines, they can get one consolidated view of the customer – plus access to customer level insights. This is key to understanding a customer’s entire financial position, offering personalized experiences, and anticipating their needs. This i the power of the single platform: a holistic view of relationships so banks can treat customers as people, not products. ?

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Compliance: regulation that supports economic recovery

While Australian and New Zealand financial institutions face many of the same challenges as other parts of the world, I see some striking differences.

Compared with other parts of the world there’s a much stronger connection in this market between banks and the communities they serve. The local banking leaders I’ve met have a true desire to work with the government to make things easier for individuals to grow local businesses. In this region, banks and governments are focused on helping people through the high-cost pressures while inflation cools and getting money moving back into the economy.? What a refreshing change!

That said, there is room for improvement. While new policies are generally well-intentioned, new and changing regulations can make things more complex.

The question is: What’s the right balance? Customers must be protected, but they also benefit from competition in the market. Also, if governments want to strengthen national economies, there’s little upside in making it harder for banks to get loans out to people.

According to Accenture’s Banking Top 10 Trends for 2024?“the volume of regulation which banks have to deal with has increased significantly over the past decade and a half.” While it’s up to policy makers to decide where to draw the line, financial institutions and regulators must come together and look at all the regulation in aggregate.

To support economic recovery, banks would benefit from a simplified and connected policy environment that focuses on the end consumer and real time activity, vs. an aftermarket event. In the meantime, a single platform can help FIs create institutional transparency for the board, C-Suite, and executive management, who can then more easily manage critical regulatory concerns like capital requirements, relationship exposure, and policy exceptions. Regulators, examiners, and auditors can gain real time access to this information, thereby reducing examination times and business process disruption.

Innovation: Embracing AI to drive the industry forward

Around the world AI is reshaping banking, and making predictive, personalized, and proactive offerings and services easier than ever. According to Accenture, banks stand to benefit more from generative AI than other industry; their analysis of operational efficiency alone indicates a potential to boost productivity by 22-30%. But analytics and AI/ML tools only live up to their potential to drive innovation when banking is done on a single platform.

Plus, when banks use common AI tools on a single platform, they can easily explain their algorithms to regulators. nCino’s explainable AI prioritizes transparency, trust, and interpretability so banks can provide detailed explanations of their lending and other decisions. This is essential to ensure regulatory compliance and ethical practices.

In the current economic and technological landscape, the opportunity cost of maintaining multiple systems is increasing. Single-platform banking is the fastest way to take advantage of AI tools in a transparent and compliant manner while also streamlining operations. Comment below with you thoughts or message me to learn more about how nCino, Inc. 's single platform is changing the game for financial institutions in Australia, New Zealand, and across the globe.