Retail bank customers want their banks to give them “personalised experiences”, including non-financial services, and consistent service across all channels, according to new research.
Capgemini and global banking industry body Efma released their World Retail Banking Report 2022 yesterday, detailing the latest trends in consumer demand. It says that to meet these demands banks will have to invest more in systems, governance and compliance technologies.
The report said there are risks for banks in meeting consumer demands. They have to be able to bundle financial and non-financial offerings on their platforms without diluting their brand or losing exclusivity.
These broad findings echo other recent surveys. In March, Bain & Co and Salesforce released the results of a survey that found bank and insurance company customers trust their financial institution with their data and are comfortable with the data being used to provide more personalised offerings.
Bain and Salesforce also found that consumers of financial services have a growing preference for digital channels, especially ones that can handle end-to-end interactions and transactions.
A survey of Australian banking customers conducted by researcher Omnipoll for business software company Pega, which was published in February, found that the number one driver of satisfaction is easy interaction with the bank.
Digital customers – defined as cashless, regular users of online banking and preferring to pay with their phone – are the most satisfied. However, these customers are also the least loyal.
Capgemini and Efma found that customers expect frictionless services that bridge the physical and digital channels, which they have termed “phygital”.
“The formula for growth sounds simple – provide customers with the right products whenever and wherever they’re at in their digital journey. But it is challenging to execute,” the report says.
Close to half of customers surveyed said their banking relationships were not “well integrated” into their lifestyles and don’t offer the experiences they want.
For their part, bank executives said they are not getting the benefits they are looking for from their data. Eighty per cent said they were concerned about data reliability and 73 per cent said they were not resourced to generate insights from their customer data.
Bain and Salesforce reported very similar problems when they asked bank executives what was holding back implementation of personalised propositions: technology and data limitations, lack or resources and not having the right talent.
The Capgemini and Efma report said fintechs and some banks are starting to use gamification as a way of engaging customers – offering rewards for opening an account and awarding points for a wide range of transactions. Some have introduced behavioural finance games.
Examples of personalisation include UK digital bank NatWest partnering with Swedish data company Tink to create an “actionable newsfeed” to its banking app that generated 1.3 million responses in three months.
Canadian Bank CIBC, which uses data to target messages to fit specific customer profiles, has reported higher customer loyalty since introducing the program.
The Bain and Salesforce report cited one bank that developed “150 unique customer experiences” and then used the customer’s data when providing one of these experiences to personalise