Accelerating the digitalization of retail banking

At a time when most retail banks are placing the scaling of their network at the heart of their strategy, and where 7% of account openings are with neo-banks, the digitalization of banking transactions is a fundamental element of the transformation of retail banking. Despite significant efforts in this area by banks and an expectation expressed by 68% of users, the share of 100% digital banking transactions seems to plateau.

While the act of purchasing banking products, especially the most "involving" ones, remains very specific, analogies can be found with the retail sector. This sector is experiencing an unprecedented digital acceleration with a 27% increase in online transactions in 2020. Retail has overcome similar barriers through unified commerce. We propose exploring 7 improvement paths that have contributed to this transformation and imagining how they could apply to retail banking.

After a long period of hesitation, major banks are ready to adopt "cloud-based" solutions. The Salesforce platform should offer them a formidable accelerator to connect the main areas of their customer engagement and their back-office applications to achieve digital performance that meets their customers' expectations.

All major retail players are deploying an omnichannel strategy, eliminating the boundaries between different channels.

This implies offering the customer the possibility to interact with the brand on the channel of their choice, including on the go, with a consistent experience.

More importantly, it implies being able to switch from one channel to another without disruption during the purchase cycle with a consistent level of experience. This imperative is made even more pressing as digital banks are now offering an end-to-end online experience.

While daily banking services are now reaching a significant level of omnichannel convergence, many services are still lagging behind, notably life insurance, financial investments, and customer relationship management.

To move towards omnichannel, retail banks must prioritize:

• Optimizing their CRM to ensure complete coverage and efficient portability of customer information.
• Filling the gaps in their digital offering.
• Ensuring continuity between different points of contact.

Following Wells Fargo, Chase bank now offers cardless cash withdrawals at ATMs. It's sufficient to use the bank's mobile app on a smartphone and bring it close to the "Cardless" logo on the ATM. To withdraw money, just enter the PIN of the bank card to access the usual ATM menu.

The conversion rate is the key metric that obsesses e-commerce managers in retail. Indeed, this metric remains the main lever for the success of any digital sales channel. With an average of 2% in France, it can jump to more than 25% in the most exceptional cases (e.g., Victoria's Secret campaign).

This metric should be a primary concern for banks. The main drivers to optimize it aim to make the purchase act as smooth as possible: product display and visibility, simplicity of entering customer data, smoothness of the payment funnel...

The winners will be those who maximize customer entry into a purchase journey, but especially those who keep the customer in the purchase funnel, reducing the number of "abandoned carts".

Priorities to increase the conversion rate include:

• Optimizing the clarity and visibility of offers.
• Maximizing the automatic entry of information.
• Simplifying and automating the purchase journey.
• Providing access to advisors or specific advice during the purchasing process.
• Implementing actions to prevent exit from the purchase funnel (pop-ups, chat...) or favoring return (re-targeting, marketing automation).

Atom Bank, for example, uses facial and voice recognition to appeal to the 18-35 age group. In India, the 100% mobile bank Digibank, launched in 2016 by DBS, offers account opening in 90 seconds thanks to biometric recognition. BNP Paribas created Nickel in early 2017, which allows opening a bank account at a tobacconist.

You might not even notice them anymore, yet they are now everywhere.

Reassurance elements accompany a large part of current purchasing journeys. Reassurance refers to all the means implemented to convince a prospect or customer that their purchase is risk-free and that they are making the right choice.

Given the level of involvement required for banking purchases, this element is even more important as it is often overlooked.

Several reassurance elements can be adapted to banking product purchases:

• Visibility of reviews from previous customers.
• Transparent description of full pricing.
• Highlighting of key contractual clauses.

However, for more complex purchases, the ultimate reassurance consists of physically interacting with an advisor. Therefore, the strategy to highlight is access to an advisor who can access all customer data and quickly identify relevant elements.

Chatbots that can answer customer queries can also complement this approach.

Under the pressure of increasingly dense competition, the retail sector has moved from the era of segmentation to that of personalization, and then to hyper-personalization.

The multiplication of data and sources on customer activity allows for previously unthinkable use cases, such as offering a consumer a product in real-time following a comment on a social network or a search.

Bank marketing is still largely based on non-dynamic data such as age and socio-economic profile, the so-called "statistical clones." Some initiatives, like offering insurance services following an address change, may exist but remain limited.

Yet, many customer events are visible to banks and could be leveraged:

• Requests for loan simulations or research on financial products.
• Checking stock prices.
• Interactions with an advisor or a call center.
• Visiting a website.
• Actions on a social network.

It is urgent for banks to implement digital marketing tools that allow for the deployment of an advanced strategy of personalized marketing leveraging the information they already have.

Prior to digital marketing, banks also need to focus their efforts on positioning their brand through Content Marketing and offering value-added content. This strategy allows for achieving several objectives:

• Strengthening of the image and acquisition.
• Possibility of multi-channel presence.
• Optimization of search engine rankings.
• Generation of reviews and viral potential.
• Brand positioning.

And offers multiple possibilities for data capture:

• Content sharing.
• Identification of interest and appetite.
• Lead generation.
• Identification of visitor interest.

Examples of value-added content are numerous:

• Infographics.
• Interactive simulators and calculators.
• Banking research.
• Frequently asked questions.
• General financial advice (insurance, investments, real estate).

OCR systems and electronic signatures are today reliable and validated by regulators.

Unified Commerce solutions allow tracking and visualization of all customer interactions across all channels.

Beyond improving customer satisfaction, these improvements have a significant impact on advisor productivity.

The limit to optimizing their scope lies in the orchestration and management of actions performed by the actors. Advanced CRM tools can automate this step to optimize the customer experience.

Meilleurtaux offers its clients the ability to upload all the necessary documents for borrowing online.

Banks have at their disposal a wealth of data that allows them to envision a radical transformation of their customer relationship. To leverage this asset, they must be able to organize and structure their data architecture and implement the intermediate layers that allow all this data to be useful. The challenge of data architecture is threefold:

• Organize the data into a coherent and actionable set.
• Real-time access to these data to implement predefined digital strategies.
• Provide operators with relevant dashboards to address their customers under all circumstances.

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The challenges are numerous, including data protection, banks must be able to monitor the integrity of their applications and anticipate bugs. This requires a real-time view of your applications and systems. To achieve this, banks must quickly deploy various types of solutions:

• API Managers
• Middleware
• Business Intelligence

Beyond improving customer satisfaction, these improvements have a significant impact on the productivity of operations.

LCL launches its solution that combines Big Data and a corporate data warehouse within a Hadoop platform to unify its client data. This is to respond to the increasing power of business cases and absorb the increase in data volumes to be processed.

The examples we've just seen show a growing presence of customer data. Historically closed and "siloed" for understandable security reasons, banking information systems must face the dual challenge of application and data interoperability, and security and personal data protection.

The Salesforce platform offers a range of solutions to face this dual challenge through optimized API management and an unmatched experience of secure data management on the cloud.

Using Salesforce as a customer data repository can enable the rapid deployment of a secure and scalable architecture that enriches the user experience by progressively adding use cases.