2015 holds a great deal of promise for retail banks who can truly deliver an omnichannel banking experience, leverage customer analytics to enhance banking engagement, and understand application performance from the eyes of consumers and regulators. Below are some of our favorite 2015 predictions we thought we’d share.
Prediction 1 – Successful banks will deliver on the omnichannel experience
“Banks have a great deal of work ahead of them to deliver a high-quality, low friction, and engaging customer experience across all delivery channels, while concurrently lowering the cost to serve. Doing so is not optional…”
– Bob Meara, senior analyst with Celent’s Banking practice (Retail Banking Channel Systems in North America: The Quest for Omnichannel Continues)
Prediction 2 – Successful banks will leverage customer analytics to improve banking engagement
“Understanding customers is the foundation to a sustainable competitive advantage in banking. Therefore, financial marketers can no longer wait to embrace the power of advanced analytics to gain insights and evaluate opportunities that will improve cross-selling, up-selling and enhance share of wallet.”
– Jim Marous, Publisher of Retail Banking Strategies for The Financial Brand and Digital Banking Report (Customer Analytics Is Key To Growth In Banking)
Prediction 3 – Successful banks will invest in technologies to better understand causes of application downtime
“Banks will upgrade their APM capability in response to an increasing focus on application availability by financial regulators. The provision of online banking has long since moved from a nice-to-have to a service level expectation. In Europe there have been fines in 2014 for banking application down time and in other parts of the world expectations for application availability are being set in regulatory stone, for example, the new MAS TRM guidelines (Monetary Authority of Singapore Technology Risk Management).”
– Bob Tarzey, Analyst and Director, Quocirca (15 APM Predictions for 2015 – Part 3)
So what is the common thread throughout all these predictions? They all reflect the growing need for banks to easily capture and analyze transaction data. As stated by James Plath, digital lead for the financial services industry at Gartner Consulting, within a recent predictions piece called, “10 Ways Technology Will Change Banking in 2015” posted by American Banker, “Banks own – arguably – the richest data set in existence on any person: transactions.”
In addition to these predictions, we would like to add one more from INETCO: For those retail banks that invest in transaction monitoring and analytics tools to monitor application, host and network performance, and to better understand customer engagement, this will be the year your data-driven strategies lead to increased profitability.
What are your retail banking predictions for 2015?