The Empowered Financial Consumer

For some financial institutions, Know Your Customer (KYC) regulations may be overshadowing really “knowing your customer” …AND knowing that the empowered financial consumer has more choices to move their business every day!

It’s not so much the latest technology anymore as experience! While financial institutions are now aggressively upgrading digital platforms to maximize efficiencies and become more user-friendly, many fail to understand that their evolving digital capabilities also created an empowered financial consumer. That empowerment comes in the form of choosing to use an institution’s online or mobile application to complete a transaction (like paying a friend) or abandoning the app for a third-party service (like Venmo).

Such desertion is an indication of a customer experience that has fallen behind consumer expectations. When a user can find an easier or more appealing solution for their digital transactions, the abandoned institution should be looking internally for what they aren’t providing. In the age of digital technology, it all comes down to “the experience.”

Let’s face it, the digital customer experience is a do-or-die imperative. Despite the change in adoption and preference trends, there is no replacement for effective customer support and innovative product delivery.

Current innovations growing in the regional and local financial institutions include customer support like chatbots with automated responses, contextual on-screen messaging, or digital access to live customer support. However, settling on them without looking for tomorrow’s products and services will leave modernizing institutions behind, just as they are striving to catch up.

Regardless of which technical innovation, customers will always require help and support tailored to them, or they will abandon their activity, or even worse, the institution they find bothersome. Institutions that recognize the need for innovative products and support services that meet customers where they are, not just innovative technology, will maintain and grow their customers.

It’s easier than ever to attract new business through digital channels, but it’s also just as easy to lose out to the empowered financial consumer. Understanding user needs empowers digital investments and finding the right ways to support that user experience is just as important as the new investment itself.