Financial services in a Digital Age. How to stay Relevant?

Living in a digital and innovation-driven world, one has to always keep moving forward. Otherwise, you will be left behind and no one can help you.

This is especially important for the financial services, and banking in particular that still very much rely on legacy systems, old-school services and most importantly – old, or even outdated thinking. However, the emergence and continued spread of FinTech innovation has brought fruitful benefits, which quite confidently allows me to state that the future of financial services is bright.

In order to stay relevant and outperform your peers, you have to think one or even two steps/years ahead.

Anyway, no matter whether you are a FinTech start-up, or a high street bank, the above condition still holds – you have to keep moving forward. Always. In order to stay relevant and outperform your peers, you have to think one or even two steps/years ahead.

Having this in mind, I would like to share 4 tips that are highly relevant for any business in the financial world.

Customer experience is the KEY

In order to survive and be relevant, any brand must transform itself into an experience business where delivering a mind-blowing customer experience is the ultimate goal. In a mobile-driven world, this is especially important for the so called challenger banks, or mobile/app-only banks since you literally have couple of seconds to make the first impression. And it’s better be the best one you got.

Everyone is the steward of the customer experience.

Creating an amazing customer experience is the decisive thing that separates market leaders from the rest of the crowd. This is THE JOB not only for marketing or sales departments. It’s the ultimate job for all of the company, and every individual employee, be it CEO, CFO, or customer service agent. Everyone is the steward of the customer experience.

How to become an Experience Business

Some great advice was given by Brad Rencher, Adobe executive vice president and general manager of digital marketing, during his keynote at Adobe Summit 2017. Write them down and read every day.

1. The company must know and value its customers – and know what they want even before they ask for it.
2. The company must speak in one voice across sales, marketing, support and all other functions.
3. Technology should be transparent to the customer. Experience, not medium is the message.
4. The company must delight its customers at every turn so that customers’ expectations of the brand would grow and consistently and constantly elevate.

First impression is the last

As mentioned earlier, nowadays world is moving at unprecedented pace. Everyone wants everything NOW – to consume, to get a reply, to send & receive money. Sometimes, they even wanted that yesterday.

Your costumers can easily move to your competitors.

Having so many digital ways how to engage with you, customers can as well engage with your competitors. Therefore, you have to make that engagement the focal point that would tip the scales in customer’s head towards your brand, and associate with what you (as a business) believe and propose. Otherwise, s/he will easily move on to your competitor. And you don’t want that.

Focus on Mobile

Again, it was outlined earlier, but it most definitely needs a separate section due to its importance. I will give you some facts here:

• Overall, visits to websites have declined 0.4 per cent since January 2014.
• Total spent on websites has dropped by 22 per cent from 2015 to 2016.

The mobile is behind this shift, and it shows no trends to stop. I must stress that I am not saying that MOBILE should the ultimate strategy in the financial services. No, the most important thing is that business should have A STRATEGY (and believe me, some of them don't have one), and mobile has to be a part of it. See, for example, PayPal, Venmo, TransferWise and others. They know what they are doing, and that’s why they are one of the best.

The most important thing is that business should have a strategy. And mobile has to be a part of it.

Bringing it all together

To sum up, I would like to stress this once again – in order to stay relevant and prosper, you have to move together with the constantly changing world. Sometimes, you even have to make the first step and show the way.

Change and new things can be hard. But the worst thing is becoming useless and irrelevant.

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