Integration of financial tools makes banks competitive.
An integrated view allows businesses and customers to have access to a wide range of banking service providers and services.
This empowerment leads to banks becoming innovative in a bid to provide better services to their customers.
Integration means that banks provide products tailored to customer needs.
Bank customers can then access their money with ease and send it across different channels while still saving for their future needs.
Financial service integration equals the simplification of geographical, regulatory, and financial constraints.
According to a Global Consumer Banking Survey, the retail banking may lose relevance to their customers if they fail to integrate.
But what are the specific threats banks and financial institutions need to ward off through integration? Some of them are:
Customer Expectations
Technology leaders like Amazon and Facebook are setting standards for customer experiences. They provide ease of accessibility, convenience, and emotional bonds with their customers. Customers are willing to switch to a non-bank experience if it means they’ll receive the best customer experience.
FinTech Disruptions
FinTech can provide customers with simple intuitive experiences. They offer services that most banks do not provide including blending online chat with payments.
Erosion of Trust
Customers are continuingly losing trust in banks in terms of providing them with unbiased advice. The trust has shifted to technology firms, social networks, and online retailers.
How Integration Captures Customer Needs
Financial institutions need to look beyond the traditional ways of offering products and services to their customers. And this isn’t just about banks.
From the lone accountant to the FinTech startup, everyone needs to hear the customer loud and clear. Ways to stay relevant in today’s customer-centric economy as a financial services provider include:
Tailoring Products to Consumer Needs
This means developing products tailored to individual customer needs. They have to find out what customer touchpoints add up to a fulfilled experience.
They can then re-shape these interactions to provide a leading customer experience. The collection of data is done through integrated financial apps that have the capability to collect data, analyze it, and offer insights on it. These apps allow financial institutions to offer targeted products and services.
Seamless Delivery of Services and Payment Channels
Data and insights collected from the customer’s journey are used to create a seamless personalized experience. Businesses need to ensure that the customer is satisfied with their services. This way, they can build value and reduce costs.
Consumers expect a unified experience across all their devices. They also want to be able to start a process on one device and complete it on another. Banks have to adopt the omnichannel strategy that effectively wins customers in search of convenience.
To achieve this, banks must integrate between physical and digital channels. This means leveraging all consumer channels including their bank branch, online presence, mobile connectivity, and apps.
By personalizing these channels, organizations will gather and manage data for insights into the needs of their consumers.
Interoperability
Customers care about their money and want a seamless way of paying for goods and services. Interoperability allows systems and organizations to work together seamlessly.
The interconnection between mobile money services and external services creates value for the consumer and banks. This helps banks reduce cost and provide customers with increased functionality and convenience.
Customers can now seamlessly transfer money from their mobile and bank accounts. They can transfer money between two different mobile money services in the same country, to another country via a remittance hub like Western Union, and they can make a direct account to account transfers between countries.
Integration Is the Future of Finance
Consumers want a seamless and frictionless financial experience. There are many alternative banking services that can deliver such an experience.
In order for banks and other financial institutions to remain competitive, they must adopt integration and meet the customer’s demand for convenience and simplicity.
They must drop the traditional one-size-fits-all banking approach and tailor products and services that are in tune with consumer needs.
A research by Deloitte found that customers are willing to pay for personalized products.
Businesses that do not personalize offers are more likely to lose customer loyalty and revenue.
The future for financial services requires modernization of core systems. Consumer preferences will also continue reshaping financial services. Banking services need to adopt digital transformation and integrations that will lead to more trust, loyalty, flexibility for the customer, seamless experiences, and consumer-centered services.
