Manish Maakan, Chief Executive Officer, Intellect Global Transaction Banking (iGTB) and Uppili Srinivasan, President & Business Head – Digital, Payments and Corporate Treasury Exchange, iGTB explain in detail how the new age fintech approaches are impacting commercial banking and how iGTB is leveraging new technologies and developing new architectures to create the new future.
The banking industry is rapidly changing, and in the next decade, it will witness significant and fundamental shifts that will reorder the industry. Banks need to define their purpose and set a course not just for modernisation but for true transformation.
Commercial banking has been experiencing significant changes in recent times, and these changes are expected to have a far-reaching impact on the banking industry. In the coming decade, commercial banking is bound to be reordered dramatically. Therefore, banks must evaluate their future strategies, not only to modernise their systems but to undergo transformation truly. Understanding the customers’ needs and providing a best-in-class user experience is essential.
In this regard, the Consumerisation of Commercial Banking (COCB) emerges as a critical strategy for banks to compete effectively in the new consumer-driven economy.
Consumerisation is the emergence of individual customers as the primary driver of product and service design and COCB is the impact of an individual customer’s wants, needs, and behaviour on commercial banking products and services. COCB is all about catering to the customer’s transactional and emotional needs, and it ensures that the entire user journey is designed to guarantee a bestin-class user experience.
We distil this down to 6 tenets of consumerisation, and then we ask banks the question if this is a distraction to your core agenda, or if is it a vital lever to use for executing your core agenda.
The 6 key tenets to COCB that banks need to
understand and have a gameplan to embrace are:
1. Hyper Personalisation:
The first tenet deals with treating each customer as if they are the only one, a segment of one. The use of extreme personalisation not only boosts customer experience and enables trust building but also has a beneficial influence on net revenue and lowering of cost.
Hyper personalisation is a core tenet in retail banking, as it should be a natural aspect of a bank’s strategy. However, in commercial banking, some banks may focus on the enterprise as a whole, rather than the individual user within that enterprise. Our perspective at Intellect is slightly different. We recognise that each individual user within an enterprise has a specific role with its own set of KPIs, and they bring their unique persona to that role. We believe that by considering all of these factors together, we can achieve a more comprehensive understanding of the customer and deliver better outcomes.
2. Real-time, Connected Journeys:
Any outcome that a user is trying to achieve is actually made up of a number of journeys that are more connected than one might imagine. Embedding the right technology enables customers to present their context only once which can then propagate to each service provider in the entire journey.
For instance, when you visit www.booking.com, it provides you with real-time updates such as the number of people who just booked a room or the number of rooms remaining. Additionally, it informs you of the number of individuals who have booked a similar room within the last 24 hours. These real-time touchpoints are crucial in embedding immediacy within the transaction and decision-making process, as they help to create a sense of urgency and increase the likelihood of making a purchase.
Another example is the travel industry, where www.expedia.com offers a range of services such as airline tickets, hotels, local transportation, and trip advisories. They have recently integrated weather conditions, providing travellers with the necessary information to plan accordingly. The challenge is how to integrate the user journey seamlessly and create a frictionless experience on a large scale, regardless of whether it is during holiday sales or sporting events. It is essential to ensure that your infrastructure can scale up in all such situations.
3. Action-triggering Insights:
In the continuum of serving Information, offering Analytics, enabling Decision making and executing Transactions (the IADT paradigm), the mere provision of information or acceptance of readymade instructions to execute in an order-taker manner is passe. Banks need to operate on the sophisticated end of this spectrum where they use analytics to enable decision-making and then execute the transaction.
4. Immediacy:
Recommending actions is good. Driving urgency and having them executed immediately, in a risk-free manner, is better!
5. Desire & Trust-based decision making:
The two most important factors a consumer uses to make or rationalise a decision are a) desire for the product or service and b) trust in the provider. Desire and trust have relevance not only at the point of sale but also during the entire lifetime of the relationship. Banks need to address both these elements with their offering set.
6. Friction-free experience – even at scale:
The consumption pattern in the world of consumers is not uniform. There are points of inflection where the scale explodes significantly. However, the end user would accept no compromise on his or her experience being friction-free – even at scale. Having the right kind of technology architecture to address this is key.
Commercial banking is about to undergo a dramatic change that will drastically change its technology roadmaps. Modernisation by itself won’t be sufficient. Banks need to make plans for a future that embraces rapid change and satisfies unheard-of client needs. Consumerisation of Commercial Banking allows banks all over the world to effectively compete in the new consumer-driven economy in addition to undergoing digital transformation.
iGTB has used design thinking to construct commercial banking services that contain contextual products, platforms, solutions, and banking-as-a-service capacity to support banks adopt this trend. They are supported by a system known as the Commercial Banking Operating System (CBOS), which is an architecture built on composable, contextual, and hyper-scale technology.
– Manish Maakan, CEO of iGTB
From a digital strategy standpoint, there is an overarching theme of customer experience that banks need to focus on. This involves understanding the stated and unstated needs of customers and connecting the dots to deliver a friction-free experience. iGTB recommends that banks adopt a three-pronged integrated strategy to embrace the COCB. The rst step is to think contextual and design products that can cater to specific customer personas. The second step is to choose the right kind of technology architecture that can deliver the tenets of consumerisation. The third step is to develop products and services that can be individually assembled, offered on a platform, or embedded on a banking-as-a-service construct.
– Uppili Srinivasan (Upps), President & Business Head – Digital, Payments and Corporate Treasury Exchange, iGTB
Adapting to Change: How Commercial Banks are Responding to Shifting Landscape:
Digital transformation for banks involves looking at the transformation piece holistically from both the outside and inside. The future of banking, he believes, will be driven by the adoption of the right technology and open-mindedness to collaboration opportunities with new emerging models.
iGTB’s Strategies to Empower Banks and Drive Transformation Beyond:
iGTB is finding opportunities in all aspects of digital banking, including channel propositions, cash payments, liquidity management, virtual accounts, sub-accounting, escrow, trade, and supply chain. He notes that banks are looking for solutions that can creatively wire these large product blocks together, and iGTB is well-positioned to do so.
