Letting client experience drive innovation

Consider the staggering array of new innovations that have entered the scene in just the past few years. From mobile wallets, to new payment services (such as Apple Pay, Snapscan or Zapper), to cryptocurrencies, robo-advisors, personal financial management tools, crowdfunding services, social lending, and more.

Companies that aren’t banks are now aggressively becoming diversified financial services providers (think of the likes of Discovery, Virgin, and even Facebook with its European e-Money license). And companies that are banks are increasingly growing new green shoots in other industries: FNB is becoming a telco; and Absa is becoming a platform-based micro-services aggregator with the publishing of APIs for fintech firms to hook into.

All this culminates in a very uncertain environment for retail banks, insurers, investment houses, wealth management companies and others in financial services.

Customer experience principles endure

So just how can consultants, advisors and technology providers help their financial services clients to navigate through this ever-changing landscape?

As a departure point, it’s worth acknowledging that technologies come and go. Some catch on, others never really fulfil their promise, and others are leapfrogged by even newer innovations. But the fundamental principles that go into ensuring customer loyalty and share-of-wallet will continue, irrespective of the next big innovation.

Those that will remain on top will be the financial services companies that are tuned in to their customer’s desires and challenges, who deeply understand their various markets, and are able to respond rapidly.

By taking a customer-centric, design-led approach to the solutions that are built, it becomes possible to do this, and to integrate new technologies with relative ease, without IT budgets billowing out of control.

With a next-generation digital platform financial services firms can essentially build one set of services, and seamlessly deliver it to customers to the channel of their choice, “on the customer’s terms”.

This extends the concept of omni-channel to its broadest possible definition: to include web interfaces, native smartphone and tablet apps, embedded services in messaging tools, SMS, USSD, physical channels, and even the likes of wearables and virtual reality. The principle is that customers should be empowered to consume any service, perform any transaction, on the device or through the channel they prefer.

Party at the front, business at the back

Achieving this “customer experience nirvana” requires a digital platform that not only produces elegant customer interfaces, but also integrates intelligently with the legacy infrastructure at the core of the enterprise. Many of South Africa’s major banks and insurers, for example, rely on complex arrangements of legacy infrastructure that is often decades old.

Simply ripping this out is often not viable, so the smarter play is to embrace digital platforms that transform those applications, and ready them for the accelerating pace of the customers’ digital demands.

Digital platforms, encompassing DevOps, low code or rapid application delivery (RAD) platforms rescue organisations from the constraints of their legacy infrastructure, creating a harmony between one’s customer experience vision at the front-end, and transformation goals at the back-end.

These platforms enable the entire technology stack (the data, processes, business rules, and functions) to be digitised and often automated, abstracting the technology complexity and helping the organisation to focus on its most important task: enhancing the customer’s experience.

Undoubtedly, financial services are ripe for disruption. The winners will be those that take advantage of new digital platforms – to change the value proposition, elevate themselves from competitors (both old and new), and serve customers on their terms, in the way that they would like. Extending digital delivery to any channel and particularly mobile, means we are literally in the customer’s pocket. What better opportunity to expand “share of wallet”?