Do you know the first thing that your consumer expects from your business? Is it empathy? Is it the understanding from the people assisting them? Or is it a flawless customer experience? The answer to it can vary from business to business but if we look at it from a banking customer perspective then the consumer is looking for everything at their fingertips. They want it instantly.

These growing expectations have given birth to a mobile-first digital transformation strategy. It helps the business in providing the services that consumers are looking for. And if you still taking the old route for fluffing customer expectations then be ready to lose consumers to your competition.

Therefore, it becomes essential for one to embrace these upcoming technologies to enhance employee’s productivity, and at the same time gives your customer an overwhelming and satisfying experience.

Mobile-First Approach: What Does It Mean?

The secret of success is to do the common thing uncommonly well. And if you know how to do it then the sky is your limit.

“The trend towards the transition of digital banking services to mobile applications has become so obvious that it is no longer necessary to provide extensive statistics to justify it. According to a number of EU banks, at the end of 2019, the ratio of customers using a mobile application ranged from 58% to 72%, and during Q1 2020, that figure had increased and reached 82%.”

Even some unprecedented changes caused by pandemic has undeniably boosted the growth of mobile digital offerings. It means banks and financial institutions have to come up with new ways and mediums to remain relevant to their employees so that they can continue working from their homes.

However, mobile banking not only simplifies customer banking needs but at the same time it helps bank receives a sharp increase in the number of satisfied and loyal customer and enjoys increased brand loyalty and the opportunities to sell new services.

But what makes mobile CRM a friendly and apt pick for sales and marketing professionals in the banking world? It enables the teams to access and manage information in real-time, wherever they are. Earlier, employees were tied to their desks and were supposed to be available whenever customers need them. Just like customer expectation is changing, banks and financial institution are also responding to them the way they are expecting. Sales team members travel between offices and locations to meet their customers. Research has shown that companies gain an extra 240 hours of work annually from employees using mobile devices for work-related purposes.

This is because mobile smart devices allow users the freedom to work from wherever suits them best.

How to create a Mobile-First strategy?

Adopting a mobile-first strategy in your organization can be challenging or daunting in many ways, but if implemented correctly then the outcomes are immense. To lay down a strong foundation, banks must first understand their customer journey, identify their usage, check the integrity of the devices their employees use, and lastly make sure customers’ confidential data is protected.

Once these things are addressed, mobile CRM can lead to immense benefits for employees when they’re away from their office enabling them to:

• Deliver real-time critical information
• Easy access to a full desktop computing solution from a remote location
• Close deals more quickly while on the road
• Help user collaborate with colleagues and customers
• Integrate PIN and CRM information that they need to work more efficiently
• Share contact and lead information with other account team members

Staying connected with Siebel CRM mobile

Sales representatives need to perform common and repetitive tasks quickly, such as managing appointments, collaborating with sales team members, and connecting with customer contacts.
With Siebel CRM mobile solution, you can get real-time access to customer’s information, history, reports, and more, over your smartphones, tablets, and any other devices. It offers pre-built mobile applications such as sales mobile and service mobile, which can be configured and integrated with the Siebel CRM applications.

Moreover, it can enable your customer-facing teams to stay connected anywhere anytime. This means with a single click, users can view account team and customer contact information; communicate with them through a call, email, or text message; and get driving directions.

Bottom Line

“Business on the go” is in need of an hour and it will be here to stay irrespective of businesses. That means mobile solutions are and will be an important part of a comprehensive business strategy and if banks and other financial institutions want to add value to their CRM systems then they need to provide a robust solution to their sales representatives that can ease their job by getting relevant information at a glance and quickly complete important activities with fewer clicks.

With proper implementation of Siebel CRM, banks can generate user enthusiasm, resulting in better customer insight to improve customer satisfaction, reduce costs, and lastly increase sales.

The year 2021 will see the banking industry grapple and evolve with Digital first approach in everything that they do. In this article, we try to summarize various tips that may prove beneficial for any banking organization, across the world to design a seamless and superior customer onboarding experience.

• End-to-end Experience Engineering According to this report, on one hand 53% of the organizations which were polled reported that they offer solutions which are digital start to finish. However, when the customers were polled they reported that a visit to the bank was required to complete the KYC or document verification.

  Client onboarding to account management to offering new services, post andemic it has become imperative for the banks to offer a seamless digital experience. An experience which is crafted based on proven domain expertise.

• Contextualisation of Experience
  As the world embraces the new normal, it is now critical than ever for the banks to contextulse and personalise the client onboarding experience.The conscious contextualisation of the solutions could be based on various factors such as financial health, income segments, geographic location and much more.

  The banks could work with an experienced services provider to conceive and apply digital for banks in the context of customers, their journeys, and the various experience points across these journeys.

• Being Omnichannel Being omnichannel was is now not an enhancement but a requirement, given that the industry is embracing the new normal of living in the digital world. Customer onboarding is no different. Being available across channels such as social media, call, email not only helps improve the customer happiness quotient, but faster response times will also increase the loyalty and stickability of the customers with the bank.
• Customer Adoption and Simplicity as Design Principles Maveric brings in a deep understanding of the banking ecosystem which spans for 20 years. This is the primary reason for our ‘signature’ simplicity which is evidenced in every customer transformation journey that we undertake.

  Our solutions are designed keeping customer adoption as the foremost parameter – higher app adoption translates into satisfied customers and better retention

  A testimony of this principle is a project that Maveric’s Digital Transformation business, achieved the business vision of optimizing operations and reducing the business cost for a leading bank in the UK. Our lean practices supported by Bi-Modal / Two Speed Approach reduced customer efforts in digital application creation by up to 75%.

• Rapid prototyping for accelerated development of minimum viable product To keep pace with disruptive competition and the ever-evolving customer expectations, it is needed to use cutting edge risk & impact frameworks and simulators that allows rapid prototyping for delivering robust minimum viable products. It not only drives superior digital solution design but also increases the efficiencies through accelerated development to deployment frameworks with scalability and availability.

  For instance, Maveric worked with a key banking institution in the Middle East where we re-designed and re-architected the middleware platform and replaced it with containerised microservice solution. This redesigned solution was coupled with an intuitive UI and hence was easy to scale. The solution helped the customer optimize costs by moving into pay per API billing mode and eliminating additional infrastructure overheads.

• Proactive communication Just as being available and responsive on all the possible and relevant channels is critical in a digital onboarding journey, it is also important to establish a communication channel which is proactive and which offers solutions.

  A successful digital transformation hinges on the ability to unlock the enormous business potential of customer experiences for a bank. Players such as Maveric focus on engineering superior customer experiences for banking leaders which proves to be the right step towards successful transformation journey of onboarding a client.

• Adapting to the regulations While the pandemic has stalled many governments all over the world, it has also prompted the regulatory bodies to amend the exisiting regulations and bring in new ones to support the scalability of the digital journey. A dedicated team working on researching, adapting and designing soltuions which coply with the regualtions of the land should be a key part of the onboarding team. For instance, our PSD2 team could help you go live with the a compliant technological framework in just 12 weeks.

  We believe all of these factors when coupled with a passion to design superior experience engineering will enable a happy customer onboarding solution. Our digital transformation experts deliver accelerated experience, powered by solutions and managed services across open banking, digital channels, agile transformation and cloud adoption. Get in touch.

Banks across the world have been through a rather crucial year. The technology investments and the strategic decisions that they made in the past have not only helped them sail through this pandemic, but also emerge as a winner.

While the United Kingdom braces itself for another strain of the virus, the banks are trying to leverage the right technology to ensure that the bank reaches the unbanked. We try and take a look at 3 key trends that we believe will dominate the tech space in the UK, as we usher in the new year.

API based banking Will be in the forefront

Thanks to the open banking push, the banks across the region have chalked out a very robust strategy for digital transformation. Most of the banks have already started using API based banking extensively. In 2021, we foresee that,

• Banks will concentrate their efforts on scaling their API offerings and make them available as much as they can
• Bring in more digital service offerings for their customers
• There could be more emphasis on bringing in governance standards that are common for all and ensure a safe playground

Open banking, will pave way for innovations

The pandemic has left all of us guessing about what’s in store in the future. It has become the new normal for all the industries to incorporate a strong technology-based transformation strategy as part of the growth roadmap. The banking industry is no exception to this. A successful digital transformation hinges on the ability to unlock the enormous business potential of customer experiences for a bank. The year 2021 will see a great impetus on open banking in the UK.

• With the Payment Services Directive in the background, the UK banking scene is going to be abuzz with more and more players adopting the open banking ways of business and more and more legislation being introduced.
• Neo banks and Challenger banks will now focus on increasing their focus on the apps and they will try to be banking super apps, trying to bring a bouquet of services benefitting their customers.

Engineering superior customer experiences will be the key to success

Crafting superior digital experiences mandate proven domain expertise as well as the ability to
engineer with open source and hardened technologies. This report from Deloitte says, “The promise of digital banking was never fully realized, largely due to customer reluctance and/or a lack of attractive digital solutions. But the pandemic turbocharged digital adoption across products and demographic segments.”

In the year 2021, the banks will focus on –

• Mobile-first approach when they are designing the service offerings.
• Increasingly leveraging artificial intelligence and machine learning to drive superior customer experiences
• Launching more and more ways to be cashless and financial inclusion

Players like Maveric bring in a strong base of canned user journeys and the dynamic repositories of customer touch points and personas collated and developed for the past 2 decades which helps creating superior customer experiences.

We wish you have a great year ahead, and for everything banking technology #DigitalMaverics are all equipped and ready to help you.

The year 2020 has been unprecedented for the humanity. The pandemic has accelerated the adaption of technology in every way possible and BFSI industry is not far behind. For instance this article suggests that since lockdown, Europe has seen a 72% increase in the use of Fintech apps.

As financial institutions worldwide, constantly face the challenges of maintaining leadership and retain competitive advantage, in a landscape marked by new age banks and Fintechs calls for

• Reengineering business models
• Adopting newer technology stacks & platforms
• Integrating with financial technology ecosystem

Achieving these at unprecedented speed is the gamechanger for effective transformation. In this article we look at what does 2021 look like for the banking industry.

Redefining experience engineering

For the banks, it has now become imperative that the customer needs are at the forefront. Banks will put the emphasis on redefining the customer journey in the new normal. The ability to uniquely engineer transformation solutions in customer context after thorough understanding the customer needs is going to be the priority for the banks.

Data for precise decisions

This Deloitte report indicates that 44% of the banks are already implementing measure to improve information systems that better enable them to respond to crisis and customer needs. As the digital channels now become “table stakes”, financial institutions will find ways to differentiate themselves in the eyes of the customer. Banks will increasingly adopt data and analytics solutions for updating scenarios, forecasting trends and changing risk models considering the pandemic. Data models will also be used to fine tune the customer persona and sharpening individualized offerings rather than using demographic segmentation for banking products.

Redefining payment

To keep pace with disruptive competition and the ever-evolving customer expectations, banks will start use cutting edge risk & impact frameworks and simulators that allows rapid prototyping for delivering robust MVP’s. This will not only drive heightened efficiencies but will also improve scalability and availability.

API based banking will see a significant rise in the future, driven by regulations like various open banking regulations and adaptions and financial marketplace, driving the need to integrate with the larger financial technology ecosystem. There will be a lot more synergies between various players in the industry and the end consumer is to win and in a big way.

Collaboration

Purposeful partnerships with industry leading platforms to develop solutions/drive delivery through collaborate-not-compete approach will also be on the agenda for the global banks in the year 2021. While the banks will work on developing newer and innovative services and solutions to help them and their customer steer through the new normal, a higher degree of collaboration amongst various players in the ecosystem will play a vital role in the growth of a banking organization.

Relooking the Talent strategy

As the banks adapt more and more automation, they will also look at how the available talent is better utilised and how new talent can be trained. This report indicates, 43% of all bank working hours can be automated with current technologies. The talent needs are shifting from basic cognitive skills to socio-emotional and technological skills. Banks will need to identify roles and skills which drive value for them in the world where digital is the new normal.

The world, as we know it in 2021 will not be easy to deal with. However, being optimistic and hopeful is going to be the way we live. For everything to help the banks, with the digital transformation requirements there are experienced #DigitalMaverics ready to help.

Successful digital transformation hinges on the ability to unlock the enormous business potential of customer experiences for a bank. It’s the focus on engineering superior customer experiences for banking leaders is the right step towards successful transformation.

According to Infoholic Research, the Microservice Architecture market is expected to reach $32.01 billion by 2023, growing at a CAGR of around 16.17% during the forecast period. It is not only a noticeable trend soon but also a way to grow in the years to come for the banking industry.

Let us look at how microservices will help the banks in this context.

• Modify without fear
  Banks generally have large monolithic software architecture and are wary to quickly change the same. The bank’s architecture is mostly archaic, and the technology teams take ages to make any modifications. Microservices Enable developers to change and re-deploy software without fear of compromising the core application.
• Zip through the release deadlines
  According to this Deloitte Insights report, 40% of North American banks and 29% of European banks’ IT budget is allocated to the new technologies. It is no surprise that new technologies will be based on a microservices architecture. With the new architecture in place, the release cycles could be decoupled and agility could be increased significantly. This means faster development to the deployment cycle.
• On-demand growth
  The current pandemic situation has caught most of the technology owners in the banks unaware. The World Retail Banking Report 2020 (WRBR) suggests that almost 57% of the respondents prefer internet banking, which is significantly higher than the pre-COVID area.Microservices enable a banking operation to be scalable on-demand. For instance, if there is a high volume on internet banking, only that module could be scaled up to meet the demands, as the necessary infrastructure can easily be replicated.
• Higher tolerance to faults
  The MCS is a fairly independent setup. It not only reduces the infrastructure’s failure footprint but also has a faster recovery rate since code is much less interdependent.Circuit breakers are good way to prevent the cascading failure effect between multiple microservices and also provide a default behaviour in case of failures.
• Make applications redundant
  In 2020 and beyond, applications are going to be very code light and easy to develop and deploy. MCS architecture not only makes it easy to develop new applications in a faster and easier way, but it also makes it easy to refactor or replace them going forward.While designing need to make sure the components are loosely coupled and can be replaced with new tech stack with minimal changes.
• Secure
  This latest report indicates 80% of the bank’s executives cited security as one of the obstacles of modernisation. Microservices do not only improve security since services can be isolated and a security breach does not necessarily threaten an entire application.Container based services should be out of public domian, use of API gateway and tools to monitor the application are best ways to keep app away from vulnerabilities. The jar files should always be looked forward to check on latest vulnerabilities (read: OWASP) and static/dynamic scanning of code is always advisable.

As banks move ahead on their modernisation journey, the microservices-based architecture will not only make the milestones achievable but will also make the journey pleasurable and less taxing.