Financial services has always been about helping individuals, families, and businesses take control of their assets and their financial futures in the face of uncertainty. As technology continues to morph and shift the world around us, stay grounded in the foundations of your business, but keep your eye on the horizon with these five insights:
1. Rewrite the rules of engagement with AI and voice.
The way we engage with each other changes all the time. Just 10 years ago, emojis were added to mobile operating systems and today, 92% of the world’s online population uses emojis to communicate. If symbols of smiley faces with heart-shaped eyes can change the way we interact, imagine what even more advanced technologies can help us accomplish.
Artificial intelligence (AI) and voice integration are the most popular in a slew of recent advancements with the potential to change the way we communicate and do business, especially in financial services.
As consumers become increasingly comfortable with virtual assistants in their homes and workplaces, more opportunity opens for financial services organizations to integrate them into the customer experience, from a call center bot rerouting calls efficiently, to a voice-powered banking app that makes it easy to get important information quickly.
Just as exciting as the potential for AI and voice in customer-facing applications is the possibility for AI and voice in the enterprise. With the basic construct of an enterprise app no longer constrained by traditional models, we can incorporate virtual assistants wherever it makes sense inside the enterprise.
Does it make sense, for example, for a financial services sales rep to ask her mobile device for account updates on the go? Does it make sense for a bot in a call center to briefly interface with customers to reroute calls more efficiently? If it makes sense for your business, do it.
2. Invite more customers to the table through inclusion.
Among their myriad benefits, digital advancements in financial services and fintech lead to a rise in financial inclusion around the world. As more and more people are invited to the global economy, opportunities arise for financial services organizations to both “do well” and “do good.”
Successful fintech today is mobile-friendly, designed for the customer, and easy to scale, raising adoption rates and making it more affordable for people across the globe. While the new access these technologies afford open up new markets for burgeoning businesses, this access also contributes to global development.
The World Economic Forum writes in Forbes that “Access to financial services is critical for global development, as it makes it easier to invest in health, education, and business.” As technology continues to advance and new opportunities arise for growing financial inclusion, organizations should challenge themselves to continually rethink the customer experience to adapt to different cultural, national, and situational needs.
3. Create better customer experiences from the inside out.
Financial services companies deal with a lot of complex and highly regulated data. Even before the digital age, managing it all while delivering a superb customer experience was a challenge. Now, customers expect seamless interactions whether they’re on their desktop, mobile app, or speaking directly to a rep on the phone or in person. Phrases like “fax” and “please hold for 15 minutes” simply don’t compute.
Meanwhile, the employees servicing those customers are using tools that were built decades ago and require users to stand on one leg and jump around just to get them to work properly. Okay, not really. But sometimes, it feels that way.
Somehow, many organizations expect their employees to use these antiquated systems and navigate mazes of data silos, all with a smile on their faces. But companies can only rely on the sweat equity of their employees to deliver amazing customer experiences for so long.
Companies that focus on internal processes and great employee experiences, however, find that they’re more productive and that they deliver better customer experiences and results. Doesn’t it make more sense to change from the inside out?
4. Harvest intelligence from your data.
Creating the customer and employee experiences that companies need to be successful starts with the data underneath it all. Financial services organizations need to be able to connect data from multiple sources and deliver it to the right person, at the right time, on the right device. A few successful examples: AXA
French multinational insurance firm AXA had access to the data they needed to see, but their manual reporting process was putting them a month behind in seeing it. To solve this problem, AXA created a customized dashboard that displays all the company’s data from Salesforce, plus other systems, and makes it easy to drill down into specific fields to get the necessary level of detail.
The new application, which they demoed at Dreamforce 2018, resulted in massive efficiency gains and opened the doorway to continuous innovation.
Major multinational insurance company, over 88 million customers,
Similarly, another multinational insurance company suffered from a lack of dynamic, just-in-time, customer intelligence before partnering with Fujitsu to provide a 360° view of customers for the insurance company’s underwriters. After releasing the new solution, overall adoption increased by 50 percent and overall costs fell by up to 35 percent.
5. Guard your gold mine.
You can’t talk about fintech without talking about security.In an era when data breaches aren’t the exception, but the norm, companies in the financial services industry stand to lose a lot if their data security isn’t airtight. One 2018 study by IBM reports the global average cost of a data breach is up 6.4 percent over the previous year, to $3.86 million.
“The average cost for each lost or stolen record containing sensitive and confidential information also increased by 4.8 percent year over year to $148,” the report adds. Financial services companies are dealing with regulations within regulations, preparation for new regulations, and a widening IT skills gap on top of it all.
When you’re trying to secure what you already have, thinking about innovating beyond it becomes a major challenge. One place to start? Securely accessing the data that’s already within your private network.
The Skuid Private Data Service, for example, bridges on-premise and private-cloud data sources, so you can reap the benefits of your secure information without the data leaving your private network. Interested in learning more about Skuid’s Private Data Service? Get a demo today and see how it works.
