Much has been written over the last several years about the importance of banks transitioning their business to a digitally enabled bank. Despite the intense push for digital initiatives to better engage customers and retain their loyalties, many banks are still struggling to scale or even start their digital banking transformation.
The Covid-19 virus pandemic has upended economies worldwide and exposed banks that are not ready to digitally engage with their customers. What used to be a traditionally acceptable approach to open a bank account in a physical branch is no longer operationally feasible due to social distancing measures. Banks in the virus-pandemic environment that only have account opening at physical branches will experience a direct impact on its origination metrics, translating into higher funding costs over time.
Therefore, banks in the ‘new normal’ will need a robust and engaging digital presence across relevant digital touchpoints. Deployment of a state-of-art, digital engagement platform will accelerate a bank’s digital initiatives and provide the technology foundation to support the business agility demanded by the market. Combine the technology with the bank’s digital culture, innovative thinking, and intuitive user experience, and the result will be increased customer acquisition and growth of existing customer relationships.
The days of siloed, digital channels will no longer provide the user experience and operational efficiencies required for the bank to be competitive. The business benefits of an omnichannel approach to digital are well defined and measurable.
A digital omnichannel platform provides a technology solution that allows the bank to build (or buy) key business functionality and integration adapters that support all the digital touchpoints. This approach enables the digital channels to act seamlessly, delivering a consistent user experience across all of those channels.
What are the key things to consider in the digital banking engagement platform?
There are 3 key tenets of the Digital Engagement Platform
a. The Customer Experience Layer
b. The Business Services Layer
c. The Platform/Infrastructure Services Layer
The customer experience layer will dictate how you build the user experience. For example, there are many ways you can build the mobile app user experience – Native, Hybrid, Responsive, or even Conversational. The Omnichannel Digital Engagement Platform should provide you with tools and frameworks to help you build these different user experiences.
The business services layer provides the business logic that allows transactions and services to be performed. Regardless of whether the business services are pass-through services messaging data between the UX layer and system of record, or implementing core business logic for a service, for example, approval mechanism or even a core sub-system such as merchant billing, this layer must be built in an architecture that supports reusability and scalability. The popular approaches today are container-based microservices or cloud-based function as a service that leverages serverless technologies.
Finally, the platform itself must provide the tools and framework to help solve the most common challenges that any solution needs to contend with, such as how security is managed end-to-end, how access is tracked and audited, language enablement, enterprise notification capabilities and operational robustness.
An Omnichannel Digital Platform must provide the right balance for all three layers to be truly effective and beneficial in the adoption of an Internet-Scale Architecture. The move to a digital omnichannel banking platform and the push for exceeding customers’ expectations must be provided, keeping the current regulatory environment in mind and the need for “bulletproof” security. Maintaining a customer’s trust is the key to maintaining their relationship.
True Omnichannel Support
Tagit understands what it takes to deploy a digital omnichannel capability effectively and works with the banks to develop the bank’s engagement strategy and deploy technology solutions. Tagit’s Digital Engagement Platform, MobeixTM, supports the various digital touchpoints used by customers today. Our Open APIs alongside our Mobeix™ Developer Enablement tooling allows the bank to deploy any digital channel, knowing that the channels are leveraging the entire platform capabilities, including standard business components.
Our agile product development methodology allows us to provide changes quickly to the market in an environment where Apple and Google are rapidly enhancing its platform and device capabilities. This, combined with the accelerated adoption of voice and chat channels, allows our banking clients to respond rapidly to customer channel preferences.
