4 keys to leveraging your bank’s digital investment

A version of this article first appeared in BAI’s May Executive Report: Unlock what’s next for digital. You’ll find insightful coverage in the issue on seamless consumer touchpoints, AI-powered loans, layered identity verification and more.

As the financial services industry battles with the effects of a prolonged inverted yield curve and its resulting compression on margin, bank and credit union CEOs are continually looking for ways to increase operational efficiency. Digital banking technologies have become the number-one technology investment priority as financial institutions recognize what can be gained through a digital transformation strategy that positively impacts the bottom line.

Here are four key elements to get the most out of your digital transformation resources.

Develop and deliver a platform strategy

The rapid digital evolution has at times challenged our mature industry from a technological standpoint. Banks and credit unions have patched together disparate solutions in an attempt to meet accountholder expectations, with sub-optimal results.

Accountholders face a rocky experience when online and mobile are delivered by different systems masked as a platform. It’s a strategy that may have sufficed in the early days but struggles today, when accountholders are measuring their digital banking experience against every online experience and mobile app they encounter.

Running separate platforms for online and mobile banking creates integration and service challenges for back-office employees. Managing additional connections between core and digital services creates technological complexities behind the scenes, while separate back-office portals for disconnected apps lead to pain points for your back-office support team. Both hamper efficiency and create friction.

The alternative to this inefficiency is the adoption of a unified digital banking platform that addresses the full spectrum of your digital needs:

• Device-agnostic digital banking for online and mobile use
• Comprehensive retail and business banking functionality
• Core-connected back-office tools
• Robust integration capabilities with open APIs
• Digital service continuum offering self-service to full-service capacity
• Embedded marketing resources
• Advanced analytics and reporting

Through a unified digital platform with these key features, banks and credit unions can reduce costs, simplify support and create a high-efficiency environment.

Create a digital service continuum

Personnel costs are a significant contributor to your non-interest operating expense, so it’s essential to use your team’s time and talents effectively. And yet many front- and back-office personnel rely on outdated tools and manual processes to care for your accountholders, reducing their productivity and engagement.

At the same time, accountholders are looking for service levels that match their expectations in their time of need. Failing to meet those expectations can fracture relationships and trust.

The solution to improving service efficiency is creating a digital service continuum. This continuum flexes to meet your accountholders’ needs by offering a range of options from self-service to guided assistance—and eventually full-service support over the digital channel.

This is easily accomplished when your digital banking platform includes robust built-in support functionality. Beginning with easily accessed self-help documents and progressing through authenticated, core-connected chat, screen-sharing functionality and video chat, this continuum will support your accountholders and your employees.

Employees may find themselves assisted by AI, as system-suggested chat responses help decrease the time it takes for support agents to serve accountholders while providing on-brand responses. Video chat and screen sharing can save time spent diagnosing issues, help your support team solve more complex questions quicker and facilitate positive resolutions with less tech-savvy accountholders more quickly.

A core-connected back-office tool also lets your support team work within a single tool—rather than bouncing from screen to screen and system to system—to answer inquiries effectively and efficiently. Beyond the time saved, you’ll see improvements in employee morale, reduced frustration and long-term cost savings as retention and engagement increase.

Leverage advanced analytics and reporting

In our digital world, data can be considered its own form of currency. It grants access to insights and efficiencies that would otherwise be impossible to unlock. That’s why access to data is essential to any successful effort to increase efficiency. For the best results, look for systems that provide:

• Real-time and historical data flows
• Raw and filtered data streams
• Event-based analytics
• Configurable dashboards

With these features in place, your institution can increase output in multiple areas—from identifying at-risk accountholders to creating relationship-building outreach to performing critical financial analysis in real time. Gaining insights into how your accountholders are interacting with your digital platform creates potential to drive revenue as well as focus back-office staff on target areas that can improve operations. The opportunities to be gained from having the right data are limitless.

Effectively engage your audience

When consumers and businesses engage with your digital properties—your website, your mobile app or your online banking—you have an opportunity to engage this audience and build deeper relationships.

To avoid the sense that your digital marketing efforts are merely shouting into a void, look to these tools to maximize your investments:

• Websites designed with accessibility in mind; beyond WCAG and Section 508 compliance demands, making your message accessible to all is simply the right thing to do
• In-app marketing that provides relevant and contextual messaging
• Segmentation tools that make it quick and easy to send targeted messages to a subset of your audience
• Web marketing that delivers relevant ads based on a visitor’s browsing activities
• Personalized marketing pages to onboard new accountholders and increase adoption
• Unified tools that empower cohesive messaging across the signed-in and signed-out experience
• Fall-back campaigns when visitors don’t qualify for targeted messages
• Analytics that identify top-performing ads and messaging

In the digital marketing realm, seemingly small changes can create outsized results. Using robust web and in-app tools can reduce costs, increase revenue and improve efficiency.

Putting it all together to make the most of your digital transformation

As the financial services industry adapts to a rapidly changing technology landscape, these four simple keys can drive success.

By leveraging a platform strategy, creating a digital service continuum, accessing advanced analytics and reporting and effectively driving signed-in and signed-out audience engagement, you have a tremendous opportunity to gain much-needed operational efficiencies.

Julie Morlan is Senior Managing Director of Digital at Jack Henry.