Are banks serious about customer experience? How to deliver market-beating customer experience

Abstract

With the market in flux, customer experience is more important than ever before. To thrive, banks must offer a customer experience that is at least as good as that provided by leading FinTechs. But that does not mean that banks and FinTechs are forever destined to be competitors. In many instances, the two can offer each other much of value and will profit by working together. Banks provide trust, access to customers, expertise, licencing and regulatory relationships. FinTechs, on their part, bring to the relationship agility, new ideas and innovative platforms and services. As well as partnering with FinTechs, banks can also incubate internal and external FinTechs. They can run innovation hubs, encouraging employees to think like start-up founders, and they can work with authorities to drive innovation across the whole industry. We have already seen examples of this in the way commercial and central banks have cooperated on central bank digital currencies for France in exemple. Working in these ways, banks — often in cooperation with FinTechs — can create new standards for customer experience across the widest range of connected platforms and ecosystems, and this is what customers want: the best service and the best experience as they move from mobile to desktop, whether they are in the bank’s own app or using a plug-in service on a retailer’s site. Banks are and will continue to be at the forefront of innovation, however, as customer experience design and implementation develop over the next decade. With their scale and expertise, they are ideally placed to lead the customer experience revolution.This paper discusses how banks are not only taking customer experience seriously, they are also leading the way in developing new models of customer experience, building on the best of digital and human expertise. It posits that, through internal innovation hubs and campuses, banks are already transforming themselves, using technology to provide bankers with the best tools to serve their clients.