By Neil Murphy, Global VP at ABBYY
The latest BAI Banking Outlook identified three areas among the top business challenges and priorities for financial services leaders: new customer acquisition, enhancing the mobile channel experience and making better use of data about consumers to improve products and service recommendations.
Consequently, financial service organisations are digitally transforming every aspect of their business, from consumer facing mobile applications to back-office workflow optimisation, to meet the increasing demands of the market and maintain evolving SLAs and compliance regulations. But despite innovation also being linked to increased productivity and cost savings, many banks are not using artificial intelligence (AI) technology and automation to their full potential.
Here, we take a look at how mobile onboarding and processes intelligence can improve customer acquisition and enhance the experience.
Digitally Transforming Customer Onboarding
Consumers told BAI they want to be able to start in one channel and finish in another without starting over. This omnichannel experience typically starts with mobile, however studies show 40 percent of consumers abandon applications after initiating the process, which is contributing to the $98 billion (£77 billion) left on the table by companies who fail to provide simple experiences.
The reasons cited are complexity of digital forms and heavy requirements for manual typing as the biggest barriers when it comes to onboarding of customer information. Additionally, the requirement of the consumer to download an app in order to complete these processes often presents another barrier. Banks focused on eradicating these barriers to improve customer acquisition are enhancing their digital channels with more sophisticated mobile captures technologies.
With intelligent mobile capture, banks enable customers to focus their smartphone’s camera on payment slips, invoices, ID cards, passports, or other documents they are required to submit, and capture information directly into the fields of your back-end systems for further processing—no extra steps required to download an app. Mobile web capture solutions make it possible for customers to use a web browser on their mobile device to automatically capture images of documents in real time to quickly complete the sign-up and account opening processes. This technology consistently enables banks to provide a smooth customer onboarding experience with higher completion rates.
AI technology is used to detect real-time mobile input of relevant data, provide speedy retrieval of image files, and minimize the steps required to fulfil a task for maximum ease of use.
The digital transformation of customer onboarding doesn’t end with customer acquisition. To be fully successful and earn customer trust and loyalty, financial institutions need to be able to track, monitor and take action on the processes customers are engaged in before they lead to a negative experience.
Process Intelligence Enhances Operational Efficiency
The financial industry is highly process oriented because of its service nature, however, banks struggle with the ability to completely review their processes. Most think they know how their processes work but it is often far from reality. It’s a critical pain point as organisations start to realise there are blind spots and they may need to diverge from original process. New advance machine learning technology called process intelligence (PI) will enable banks to analyse less structure processes, identify opportunities for improvement, increase the speed and accuracy of executing the process, all while improving the customer experience.
The industry is unique because of its complex workflows across different departments, people, and even locations. However, due to the intangible nature of the industry, these workflows are all well documented and recorded. Every action, event, or transaction is recorded in a log along with many other important attributes describing who did what, where they did it, and lots of other information about things happening operationally. These workflows typically span across different systems that do not all link together perfectly, thus creating silos of information and an incomplete picture of the businesses operations.
These factors in addition to the variable nature of the day-to-day processes of the industry make it hard for banks to figure out what the processes actually look like in an “as-is” state.
Without a clear picture into process execution, leaders have been unable to answer vital business questions due to the high levels of variability in the ways processes function. How do they ensure processes are being followed according to plan? How do they even know what those processes are and how they operate?
Process analytics delivers sophisticated insights gained from process data. With the right technology, leaders can now see a complete view of their end to end process in its “as-is” state. This is especially important when some of the largest contributors to waste in the financial industry are handoffs for approvals, requests waiting to be processed, and customers waiting in queues.
It’s important that you can find exactly where the problems in your process are occurring and not just that they are happening. Banks can easily discover the bottlenecks of their processes and where the process is taking deviations. This helps to uncover exactly where these handoffs are occurring and how long requests are waiting so that you are able to find more specific solutions to these problems.
Furthermore, financial services can use past and current performance to serve as a guide for future performance. Workers can feel more confident in their decisions and be guided by prediction, which is powered by machine learning, in order to have the best chances for success.
Whether it is with account opening, crediting, loan applications, payment, mortgage processing, or any other process, by focusing on mobile to acquire customers more efficiently, then tracking the various processes initiated by mobile and other channels, banks can effectively leverage AI in their digital transformation journey.