Banks and financial institutions are being encouraged to embrace mobile engagement as customers migrate to mobile. However, many often fail to meet their customers’ expectations due to a lack of resources, technical knowledge and/or a fully integrated mobile strategy.
So finds a white paper from mGage which outlines not only how badly banks and financial institutions need mobile, it also helps to show them how they can maximise its effectiveness through the myriad telemedia tools available.
According to a ING study, 55% of mobile device owners in the UK said they used mobile banking, and a further 12% expected to start using it within the next 12 months. In the same year, mobile was the primary method of banking for 62% of Americans, according to Bank of America. A 2017 FIS PACE Report noted that 70% of millennials said they’d checked their bank account on a mobile device in the past month.
Consumers are also omni-channel, warns mGage. They don’t think about why there are queues in branches at lunch times and why your website can’t authenticate them – they just expect you to be present at whatever time they want, via whatever channel they’re using.
“In essence, customers want seamless financial services whether they are walking into a branch, dealing with a contact centre or logging in online,” says the white paper. “When it comes to mobile, they want to use it like every other channel – on their terms.”
Unfortunately, many financial institutions are struggling to deliver the discrete services needed to satisfy customers. It’s clear, then, that a robust mobile offering is now a necessity for financial institutions looking to connect with customers.
Perhaps the biggest obstacles facing existing financial services brands are legacy operational systems and processes, says mGage. Financial brands have some of the most stringent security needs and some of the most onerous regulatory requirements of any industry, making it difficult to quickly implement changes.
Many legacy back office systems and customer-facing tools, such as online banking or insurance policy management, were likely built with little input from marketers or thought toward usability – in the not-too-distant past, systems were the domain of the IT department. As these systems have aged, they have not been easy to adapt to modern customer experience standards or organisational security needs. Worse, many were built in a time before the idea of single customer views or multi-channel communication, so they are difficult to integrate with other services and often present real stumbling blocks to organisational change.
This is not just a systems issue. In the UK, some banks, pension funds and insurance providers have existed for (quite literally) hundreds of years. Even those with comparatively short histories often span decades. This can often lead to the development of fixed hierarchy and organisational silos, further hindering change.
In the white paper, mGage goes on to suggest how banks and financial institutions can make use of the myriad mobile channel choices now available. Covering SMS, RCS, Push and OTT messaging, mGage outlines how banks, financial institutions and many other consumer-facing businesses can use mobile to deliver better engagement and ‘be where their customers are’.
