Financial institutions and digital on-boarding

Who is the proper customer and how to provide the environment?

Financial institutions and digital on-boarding

Who is the proper customer, and how to provide the environment?

Banks and other financial institutions somewhere deep inside their organization understand the importance of ?Digital-first?, but there is always a BIG BUT, too big but in the process. How can we take care of our 60year+ customers not having (but they all do have) smartphones, tablets, PCs,…

When different companies perform analysis of their customer base, most of the results end up with the average customer being 55 or 56 years old. And then they pull the hand-brake on the transformation of End-customer processes. Simultaneously, most of the involved employees are putting a massive effort into finding the WHY NOT reasons instead.

And these slow the implementation of new, fully digitalized processes to a slow pace. It is moving, but snails sometimes are faster.

Let us take a look more in-depth into the reasons. And these are applicable for most of the organizations.

Understanding digital

There are multiple players in the Digital-first game. Starting with Regulatory. Participants from Regulatory are experts in finding WHY NOT's. Being scared of his/her own shadow, they will find ghosts, even in the sunny desert, if possible. However, the more focus from the top governmental leaders is on digitalization efforts, the more brave and proactive they are. It is up to Regulatory bodies to be open, and when they listen to suggestions from the commercial world, faster and more relevant decisions they put in regulatory papers.

The second group is compliance officers. They are all over the spectrum, from clearly NO DIGITAL, to open-minded and the ones that help sales and marketing to reach new channels and new segments of customers. Some compliance officers are even open to outside consultancy and want to understand the pluses and minuses and are eager to find solutions.

And then we come to sales and marketing. These are the ones running the show. Sometimes even too eager to simplify the process, involving Compliance too late or even not at all. Although they want to do it, to transform the offerings and on-boarding, they do not have the regulatory knowledge, and this is why the project runs too long, mostly because they are not appropriately managed.

Digital on-boarding and electronic signing of contracts are not just about technology. Even the technology needs to be the right one, as there are solutions, and there are ? solutions ? on the market. You need to involve Anti Money Laundering laws, eIDAS, court practices… and usually all of these are different from EU to EU members. There are different policies for on-boarding with electronic certificates, electronic identities, video identification. Some would prefer to do a simple ?selfie? on-boarding (sic!).

Digital-first and to do it right, according to country-specific policies and laws, is a HUGE effort. It is similar to building a house. You make quite some mistakes when you build your first own house, not so much with the second one and maybe just a few of the third project. With a house, you contract an architect to minimize the number of mistakes and speed it up. With Digital on-boarding, it would be the same. Internally in the organisation, you rarely find people that already did it once or twice. But with the proper contents, the process might be smoother.

In order to put all relevant groups into the project proper planning is needed. A clear and well documented plan makes the project smoother and without huge hick-ups. We should not forget the sponsors, the proper support from the top. Management.

Not just the banks, even the governmental organisations could use some consultants to get a full scope of WHY YES, not just try their WHY NOT way. Digital on-boarding can be a fast and straightforward project if experienced people perform it.

And one more message:

The Fifty plus Olds we do have our smartphones to be used as much as possible, and we understand ?Digital?. Some of us even opened a new account via digital on-boarding lately and use GooglePay as a top of the wallet payment app.

p.s.

I admit I am over 50, but at the same very much customer oriented and tech-savvy. At the same time I am involved in digital on-boarding projects, mostly within financial institutions the last four years and I also understand AML, eIDAS and end user experience.