By Dave Jones,VP of Product Marketing at Content Services Platforms supplier Nuxeo
How can traditional financial institutions stay relevant as big-tech companies flood the market with a new wave of financial customer service innovations? Nuxeo’s Dave Jones proposes four digital strategies for survival.
As open banking continues to disrupt the financial services industry, financial technology innovators – from small fintech startups to the internet giants – are increasingly making their presence felt. Which means that traditional financial institutions can no longer rest on their laurels if they want to stay relevant to existing and prospective customers. Gartner asserts that, within a little over a decade, 80 per cent of established players will go out of business or suffer other ill effects as more attractive alternatives enter the market.
Customers are hungry for change, too. Frustrating service experiences are stoking their appetite for something new, and a provider’s digital prowess is often the primary appeal.
So why haven’t traditional banks upped their game? Digital transformation is hardly new to the FinServ agenda, yet to date, the established players have largely failed to deliver anything significantly different and exciting.
At a very practical level, major institutions are not set up to be agile. Even today, over three-quarters (76 per cent) of organisations simply can’t find the information they need to deliver digital service innovation, according to recent research by Nuxeo. Nearly the same proportion (75 per cent) want to extract the required data from “locked” legacy systems; and 79 per cent can’t connect different data sources to support more dynamic services.
By contrast, alternative financial service providers, particularly the big-tech brands, are less encumbered by traditional information systems – for instance enterprise content management (ECM) solutions, which have failed to evolve with modern priorities.
4 actionable digital strategies
As 2019 gets going, there are four practical steps banks might take to safeguard their future:
- Accept but move on from legacy constraints
Rather than think in terms of costly rip-and-replace programmes, or complex systems integration projects, there is a way to move forward while still exploiting legacy investments.
One very practical option is to deploy a cloud-optimised content services platform alongside existing core business and IT systems. It means departmental or function-specific systems can stay as they are for now, but the organisation can tap into their contents in support of additional and new use cases. These could include faster credit approvals, a more consistent experience across different customer touchpoints, or new product development.
One of the immediate problems this approach addresses is the complexity of managing different types of data and content (video content, audio files, images, etc). ECM grew out of document management, yet most businesses today are not managed according to document-centric processes.
The flexibility needed to be more customer-centric relies on being able to efficiently and easily unlock information contained within documents, and combine it with other data to build a more complete picture, allowing fast decisions and next actions to happen – aided by intelligent automation, where possible. This in turn could help reduce application approval times, for example.
The fact that content services platforms have been designed from the outset to be run on a cloud-based infrastructure means they are inherently flexible, scalable and futureproof too. They can potentially support any future customer service proposition banks may roll out.
- Achieve a clear line of sight across content silos
Even if information is stored in diverse systems, being able to see and access it all via one central hub will make it easier to manage everything from security, data protection compliance and customer permissions management, to new service innovation. The more complete the insight, the easier it will be for responsible teams to identify new product opportunities and/or maintain compliance.
- Innovate incrementally and at a faster pace
Once banks are free to do more with information they already have, they can start to press ahead with specific service improvements for customers. That could be something as simple as giving customers real-time insight into their overall financial status, across multiple financial products and reflecting up-to-the-minute payment activity.
- Delivering benefits today, while preparing for the future
After being limited for so long by locked-down data and finite system capacity, it’s important that banks build scalability and future-proofing into their strategies for information management. Avoid being too prescriptive about IT systems at this stage, and instead keep your options open by leveraging a platform that has the adaptability and scalability to support future growth..
The author is VP of Product Marketing at Content Services Platforms supplier Nuxeo [www.nuxeo.com/?utm_source=PR&utm_medium=UK]
A detailed ebook exploring practical ways forward in financial services, 5 Digital Strategies to Overcome the BigTech Threat in Financial Services, is available to download on Nuxeo’s web site
