Four Considerations to Secure your Digital Banking Future
Originally published in Finopotamus' Digital Banking Industry Leaders Forum (DBILF), Dede Wakefield, Alogent's CEO, shares best practices for credit unions who are considering a new digital banking solution.
Digital banking platforms have revolutionized the experiences account holders have with their financial institutions - by delivering more convenience, improving accessibility, and enabling banking from anywhere. However, offering online or mobile tools isn’t enough to stand out in today’s market, and your installed solutions may be holding you back.
If you decide to evaluate the landscape to better meet your long-term digital banking strategy, it’s important to also understand what challenges you want to solve. Not every platform is the same, and not every offering will meet every institution’s needs. Some foundational questions to consider include those around features and capabilities, but you’ll also want to ensure the platform allows for customization and scalability. With account holder needs and market demands constantly shifting, it’s critical to ensure your solution can also scale and flex with the trends.
As you get started on your digital transformation journey, there are four key topics to consider in a new digital banking platform that will maximize long-term success with proven returns.
Simple and Streamlined User Experience
Account holders want to feel connected even through remote channels, and a strong digital user journey allows for a true banking experience that supports your strategic goals. Find the balance between features that attract new users, enhance their banking relationships, and support an overall cohesive user journey.
In addition to an open platform with the ability to seamlessly extend complementary capabilities through APIs, ask yourself if you’re meeting the needs of all users. A true, unified digital banking platform offers both consumer and business banking. Is this essential for your institution? It may be even if business banking isn’t a market segment you currently support. It’s important to future-proof your investment in a new digital banking platform and ensure your new solution meets your goals today and for the foreseeable future. Convenient and consistent experiences deliver far greater value than just offering new tools that don’t work cohesively together.
Personalization and Differentiation
One powerful strategy to enhance the user experience and drive engagement within digital platforms is through built-in contextual marketing - delivering targeted marketing messages and offers to users based on their specific stories, behaviors, and preferences. By leveraging data, predictive analytics, and behavioral monitoring tools, banks and credit unions can harness the power of contextual marketing to enrich personalization and relevancy. As a strategic initiative within your digital strategy, personalization builds stronger account holder relationships, drives engagement, and improves user retention.
In parallel, real-time data can help institutions identify user needs and preferences more accurately, as well as opportunities for complementary products and services based on a unique account holder’s situation. These cross-promotional plays can strengthen relationships and boost revenue, while making your institution stand out.
Customization and Scalability
Scalability and growth potential translate into the flexibility to compete. This includes the ability to easily accommodate new users as demand grows, as well as to customize the look and feel of your platform’s UI.
Establishing your brand identity within your digital banking platform shouldn’t be overlooked. Yet often, existing digital banking platforms have limitations that hold institutions back by not permitting specific branding updates like product naming conventions or enabling rich graphics and screen layouts. Your digital banking channel is likely one of your largest points of engagement, and it should be treated as such - a virtual branch with branding and messaging that mimics an in-person banking journey.
Employee and Administrative Capabilities
The front end of your digital banking platform is critical – it’s an extension of your institution from outside the branch. However, it’s equally important to consider the back-end tools your employees will utilize. Powerful administrative capabilities help deliver outstanding customer and member services, as well as mitigate risk. Empower your team with the ability to proactively monitor user accounts, change password rules if needed, update user data on behalf of end users, and even prevent access to certain digital banking features, when needed. These admin tools are critical in today’s market landscape.
In addition to risk mitigation, enabling access to real-time data around every click and swipe is important. With insights presented through role and permission-based visual dashboards and reports, employees can action information faster – to launch personalized campaigns, find gaps in the user journey, or determine the need for new capabilities, for example.
There are unprecedented opportunities for banks and credit unions to elevate customer and member experiences and drive operational efficiency through digital banking. While there are countless ways to get there, it’s important to identify your goals, existing challenges, and to ask the right questions to determine the best solution and provider who can ensure long-term, sustainable success.
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