The Future of Banking

Anant Sharma- CEO A few decades ago everyone knew their banker. After a decade of outsourced call centres and heavy lunch-time queues in-branch, most customers do not expect to be able to get hold of a human in a hurry. One-to-one relationships have become a premium offering across most sectors.Banks in particular have been slow to supplement mid and low tier service offerings through digital. There is a general problem in terms of service and satisfaction as in-branch service winds down and service online is lacklustre. Negative customer experience has consistently increased year on year (up 2.5%). The sector needs to evolve, quickly. While digital is having a major effect on the sector, consumer needs have not changed. People still want to save, seek advice, invest. But banks are not even adequately providing support across the basic needs, let alone aspiring to build more emotive, long term relationships with their consumers.Research Shows…According to Capgemini research, over 15% of customers will change banks within 6 months (globally) - a staggering statistic. Sloth-like high street banks will face rapid disruption across their offering - brand name retailers, peer-to-peer lenders, crowdfunding websites and internet service providers all threaten their core offerings; a flourishing fin-tech industry is thriving off an inability to innovate.Not that I am in any way undermining the complexities involved in developing…say…a mobile banking application. But take a brief glance at the landscape - HSBC still do not offer business customers mobile banking; the Lloyds app got caught in a seemingly irreversible development cycle for nearly 3 years. Legacy back-office systems need to be updated and the data understood. But the data already exists within the respective apps - retail banks need to be far more creative in how they visualise this data.Consumers Want More…The next generation of personal bank needs to be human, intuitive, interactive - operators need to build more valuable, emotional connections with their customers.Ease of transaction and payment is a given, yet most banking services still focus on this aspect of their service proposition; large high street players need to move quickly, and use the wealth of personal spending information they have to proactively help customers make better long term financial choices.Make Money More FunThe very nature of personal finance lends itself well to a gamified approach - but are banks just too serious to lighten up? Take a leaf out of Nike - they’ve been doing it for years - and well.Surely banks, who operate in an inherently metric driven industry can implement a more fun approach to, say, helping me save toward my next life goal, monitoring health and habit through better categorisation of spending patterns. I wouldn’t mind seeing how an overlay against average spend patterns in the country, by job, age, gender, or even myself, last year.Capitalise on CapitalismThe modern human has a fundamental propensity to measure successes through metrics, money, materials - a dashboard to your financial successes and failures, coupled with personal roadmap for the future only requires the design of interpretive digital layers over data that already exists. Data that banks already have but aren’t using. Online banking needs to be more than a glorified spreadsheet please.Based upon extensive research Matter Of Form, a leading Brand Interactions agency, are unveiling a series of visualisations of the future of industries. Experience more of the future of banking here.

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