Singapore consumers have a love-hate relationship with queues. We often (willingly) put ourselves through long queues for good food and freebies, but absolutely abhor waiting for other matters, banking services included.
In fact, the wait time is one of many pain points that Singapore’s new digital banks (or digibanks) are seeking to eradicate. These digitally native disruptors are redefining the landscape of the banking industry altogether, coupling products and services that go beyond the contemporary acceptance of banking. It is a tall order, and all eyes are now on these challengers to make good on their ambitious promises to reinvent the banking experience.
At the heart of this shift is a call to prioritise the customer experience and rethink customer engagement — and cloud environments are paving the way for industry players to imagine banking differently.
For traditional banks that currently hold the lion’s share of the customer base, this is an inflexion point: How can they continue to ramp up their digitalisation efforts while staying relevant, and more importantly, competitive? We’re already witnessing growing customer demand for more digitalised and innovative services. The recent Lunar New Year festivities saw more people opting for e-gifting solutions with their banks, further driving home the need for incumbents to adapt to a rapidly changing climate.
Reinventing customer experiences
Digibanks aim to simplify the way we bank. Their digital-first approach enables them to engage unserved or underserved market niches, reaching customers through mobile-app experiences that provide a similar, if not greater, degree of functionality and service responsiveness as their traditional counterparts.
For traditional banks seeking to play catchup, this means reinventing existing internal workflows to offer better customer experiences. Today’s customers intuitively value immediacy, mobility, and connectivity for personal banking and financial services. This means refining internal bank-side workflows that stimulate flexibility and agility — traits compatible with today’s mobile and connected customer base.
Hybrid multi-cloud environments help to effectively bridge this gap by enabling greater agility and flexibility. For instance, banks can leverage the security of the private cloud and the accessibility and convenience of the public cloud to drive greater agility and scalability across their workflows and processes, with cost-savings to boot. This agility extends across operations as well, as banks mature in their cloud adoption journeys and realise that a single cloud infrastructure, be it on private or public cloud, may be insufficient for their pricing, performance, and availability needs.
As banks seek to improve service uptime and drive innovation at speed and scale, the ease and agility of hybrid multi-cloud will no longer be a good-to-have but a critical imperative for success — enabling them to build novel experiences and drive new services and value for today’s mobile-first customer.
Rethinking customer engagement
Beyond creating the novel first touch with customers, today’s banks (digital and incumbents alike) are vying to rethink how they can actively and continually engage audiences through various touchpoints in the customer’s day-to-day. This will be underpinned by core considerations, such as price competitiveness, customer curiosity, and personalisation, and leveraging data and omnichannel strategies that fit right into the lifestyle needs of the customer.
For Indonesia’s Bank BJB Syariah, this meant improving the customer experience for its over 40 million customer base, improving the speed, scale, uptime and delivery of services for consumers. Leveraging the private cloud, the bank has been able to achieve zero downtime on its services and introduce new Shariah services for customers — such as Hajj pilgrimage travel management — in two months, down from two years previously. Not only did this enable Bank BJB Syariah to increase business by up to 20% and capture a larger share of the market in West Java, but the bank also saw significant savings in man hours as well as overall IT operational costs, by at least 40%.
Similarly, RBL Bank in India sought to strengthen its convenience banking offering for customers and grow its base of credit card users. By adopting agile, always awake and automated IT solutions on the cloud, the bank was able to rapidly increase time-to-market for new products and services, with a multi-fold increase in credit card sales.
Furthermore, RBL Bank scaled its call-centre efficiency by 6 times, which reduced login times and enabled service staff to support 50,000 more customer transactions per day. This meant that the bank could focus more time on connecting qualified customers to customised credit products, which has helped cement its current position as India’s best mid-sized bank.
Reaffirming trust and security
Security, especially in the financial services industry, is non-negotiable. It is especially important for financial service providers to engender a strong sense of customer trust and confidence. Traditional banks often have an advantage in this aspect — a long history of brand credibility, and physical infrastructure as the final failsafe.
The business implication now involves taking measured steps in security designs that are more adaptable, deployable, and cost-effective as more of everyday banking takes place within cloud environments. This is where the concept of Zero Trust plays a considerable role in security design and architecture.
The zero-trust approach operates on the assumption that security breaches will inevitably occur. It is a security framework that requires all users, whether within the bank’s network or outside, to be authenticated and authorised. Basically, users need to be continuously validated before being granted or keeping access to applications and data.
Zero trust also takes the position that there is no network edge. Networks can be limited to local, in the cloud, or they can be in a hybrid environment with resources sitting anywhere.
The onus is therefore on banks to implement controls or interventions to minimise the potential damage and losses. They are also to ensure that there is authentication and checking at every stage.
Hybrid multi-cloud environments allow IT teams to create separate, isolated testbeds to experiment and benchmark the strength of security designs. These tests can then better inform the necessary improvements and protocols for security at every stage, ensuring systems are as watertight as possible.
As more customer touchpoints go digital and mobile-first, hypervigilance in cloud-led security will be a necessary long-term investment.
Keeping customer first
A successful cloud strategy needs to impact customer engagement. In a recent Salesforce survey, only a third of banking, wealth and insurance customers said they were satisfied with their service providers’ digital interfaces, advisory personalisation, and integration capabilities.
The difference can be intuitively felt. Banks are already doubling down on ways to reduce as many physical inconveniences as possible starting with shorter queues and quicker customer query resolutions. However, such refinements can only yield so much change.
If the burden of sunk costs outweighs the perceived benefits of hybrid multi-cloud for traditional banks, more customers may begin to ponder: Why bother queuing up at the bank when some things are a touch away? Digibanks are now making ‘queuing up’ synonymous with the old ways of banking. Let us not forget the customer.
