Customer Experience: The Competitive Battleground for Financial Institutions

In an increasingly fast-paced and digital world full of hype and buzzwords, it seems like the focus can often be on implementing new and innovative technologies without considering the main purpose of digitalization: to create a better customer experience that increases both wallet and market share. Customer experience is no longer just an added benefit, it is now the main competitive battleground for banks and financial institutions.

The Key to Customer Experience is Digital

Digitalization and automation are the keys to unlocking the value of customer experience. There are still way too many manual processes and technologies and data siloes in every financial institution. It is this very make-up that sets financial institutions up for failure – how can they be expected to know their customer, comply with all regulations, expedite processes and deliver a faster, better client-centric experience when none of their technologies talk to each other and there is no joined up thinking to deliver a single client view?

We’re well past the point where banks are looking to mobile apps to appear digitally enabled. That is merely a cosmetic veneer over what could potentially be transformative. If we look at financial institutions today, the middle office is where most of the headcount is – trying to manage multiple duplicative manual processes. The question financial institutions should ask is: how do we automate all of these manual processes and refocus our people on tasks that add value for the customer?

By implementing a RegTech solution, financial institutions no longer have to rely on expensive, error-prone, time and cost-intensive manual processes. They can instead allocate the headcount to value-adding, client-centric activities. This not only reduces cost, it creates a more forward-facing organization.

From Compliance to Client Experience

Financial institutions are slowly moving from a compliance-focused approach to business (particularly since the onset of the financial crisis) to one that is outward-looking and focused on reclaiming market share through the delivery of exceptional client experiences. That’s not to say that compliance is any less important than it was three or five years ago when the regulatory fines were at their highest. Regulations are as assured as taxes or death. Instead, financial institutions are now looking to automate compliance but also to work together to future-proof themselves against a constantly evolving market of regulations. RegTech enables financial institutions to take this leap.

Buy vs Build

Let’s take Fenergo as an example. Our teams run monthly forums for a host of different audience profiles such as our monthly Regulatory Forums and Design Forums, and quarterly CTO Forums. These forums aim to provide an active client voice and input into the regulatory and product roadmaps. The reason for this is simple: financial institutions don’t want to build client lifecycle and KYC solutions alone. They look at their peers and they’re all doing the same thing. They feel a solution is more mature and better when they are all holding hands and designing it. Fenergo allows them to bring that together. Attendees at our recent Global Client Council held in Ireland in June told us it was “courageous” and “refreshing” that a company listened to its global customer base and allowed them to work together. By engaging together, we can tap into a wellspring of experts, numbering 20,000+, across all of our client organizations to deliver best practice Client Lifecycle Management technologies that makes onboarding and regulatory compliance journeys seamless, transparent, efficient and visible across the entire financial organization.

Mutualizing the Cost of Compliance

Hundreds of millions of dollars have been invested in the KYC utility space in the hopes of getting to a standard to share the cost of KYC/AML processes. There is still an appetite to share the cost for standards and for regulation. It’s about unleashing it in the right way to bring benefits to the banks.

Fenergo continues to work with clients, placing them at the epicentre of its CLM universe while striving toward innovation in the digital space and bringing disparate processes together for a cohesive client experience. By collaborating directly with clients, solving regulation and digitally transforming operations, the client lifecycle can be managed in a more expedient, cost-effective way that makes the experience better for everyone.