Banking Transformation Made Simple: The Best Tips From 7 Experts

Banking Transformation Week was full of insights that can put you in the lead, whether you work at a bank, a credit union, or a fintech company. The experts who joined us were from all over the industry, and they clearly and succinctly spelled out precise ways you can excel no matter where you’re starting from. Here are highlights from seven of the presentations, along with the full videos.

How Customer-Centric Design Influences Digital Banking

Sam Maule and Kara Parkey

Co-Host of 11:FS Fintech Insiders Podcast

Focus on jobs to be done.

“We don't start with a product. We start with the job they're trying to get done. … What is it they're trying to do? What are they trying to actually get done? It requires actually diving in with the customers and talking with them and understanding what their intent is, what they are facing, and what all the touchpoints are that surround them. If you start there, it's amazing. Come out of that in the conversations and what product you'll eventually come to and what will actually work and what solution you're solving. And I guarantee you it won't be where you thought you were going to go.”

Find your unique value proposition and build from there.

“There's not a one size fits all strategy. … What's critical is to find out what's unique to your DNA, what's unique to your customers that you're servicing, and you should own that.”

How Good Data Can Positively Impact Lives

Justin Steele, Vice President at The Points Guy

Help people maximize rewards.

“The Points Guy is a points and miles travel media company that's focused on users and helping them maximize their travel rewards and programs status. We help them calibrate their daily behavior and financial relationships to reach their travel and status goals. We do this in two ways. The first is by informing users how they can transform their daily spend to maximize their travel rewards and earning from hotel, airline, and credit card programs. The second is through educating users on how they can maximize their points in miles from loyalty programs to travel cheaper or even free.”

Take these 3 steps to start a rewards strategy.

“I recommend three simple points to get started. First, have a stringent focus on the customer. Do what's best for the user, and they'll engage more, buy more, and give more data. Next, be transparent. Show them how their data is going to be used and how it's going to benefit them and they're likely to provide you more. And then finally, and most importantly, justification. Explain why you made that recommendation so that they know it's personalized for them and not just something that's going to produce revenue for the bottom line. It's something that's going to benefit them in the long term.”

The Digital Golden Rule

Bob Barr, Chief Digital Officer at First Command Financial Services

Get the experience right for people of all ages.

“Getting the experience right is particularly challenging at this moment in our history because we have so many generations that are engaging with us concurrently. On one end, you've got the Silent generation, you've got the Boomers, you've got the Gen Xers, you've got the Millennials and at this moment in time, Generation Z has arrived. They are in college, and they have entirely different expectations about how they would engage with us digitally. Now when you start thinking about the experience I've just said, you really got to start by thinking about the client or the customer or the member. And we may have a spectrum of these customers that we’re addressing and serving at any moment in time and trying to imagine what experience and how we're going to do that on a very personalized level is not necessarily easy at all. What I would challenge you to do though is think a bit beyond just simply benchmarking against, for example, the competition and what they're doing.”

Innovative Ways to Achieve Growth

Chris Nichols, Chief Strategy Officer at CenterState Bank

Unify your processes across channels and products.

“Use the same process across each channel and for each product as you move online. … As open banking takes place, having an integration layer, a data layer — both with the same data model — is critical here. MX, for example, can play a critical role.”

Use the data you have on hand to save the customer time.

“It's likely that your bank has a digital account opening process for its retail customers. However, what are you going to do if you want to add digital account opening for your small business customers or commercial customers? ... Are you gonna make them go through multiple processes? Nope. If you’re a customer and you apply for a residential mortgage, we have 95% or more of the data that you need to open a health savings account or a transaction account. That's the difference between asking the customer to take an additional 60 minutes of their time to fill out another application or just taking an additional 30 seconds to ask a few other questions and then complete a single application.”

5 Steps to Digital Transformation Success

Shayli Lones, Director of Product Marketing at MX

Know why digital transformation often fails.

“McKinsey Research reports that less than 30% of business transformations succeed. And when you look at the digital side of that, only 16% of organizations have successfully improved performance and equipped it for long-term success. Even worse, only 7% saw that while performance did improve, it wasn't sustainable. Digital transformation isn't something you can just buy and plug into your company. And the most common reason we see them failing or because 1) Vision versus strategy. If there is an unspoken disagreement on goals among the top managers, it can set a project up to fail even before it begins. 2) A culture fit. If the culture isn't ready for the lift, the project will never get off the ground. 3) Build versus buy — disagreement about when to build and where to specialize.”

Why We’re Putting Control Back in the Customer’s Hands

Brent Chandler and Brian Francis, CEO and CTO at Form Free

Solve the problem you personally want solved.

Brent Chandler says, “For me, it was personal. I was buying a house and selling a house, and going through the mundane process of the paperwork shuffle, as I call it. And it dawned on me that after spending 15+ years in financial data collection for various purposes — understanding where data resides and how to make it actionable for consumers — that there was a better way to do this process. It sparked a vision that led us down this path. It started with this understanding that I could deliver the data in a different form. It's the same information with a tremendous amount of analytics and logic and algorithms that this guy over here kind of takes care of. But we could effectively do the same process that normally takes 30 to 45 days in a matter of minutes. It was not a stretch of my imagination, and what I didn't know was how daunting the task would be, but I knew with all my certainty, my passion, my heart, that this could be achieved. The true constituent that we needed to help serve was me.”

A Data-Driven Financial Health Strategy

Sherrie Krizic, SVP of Financial Wellness at Local Government Federal Credit Union and Erin Caldwell, Director of Client Voice at MX

Survey account holders to understand their financial health.

“We decided to reach out to MX and launch a survey to our members to find out what they are thinking about their financial health and their situations. Are they spending, saving, borrowing, and planning? How healthy are they? Are they vulnerable or are they just coping?”

Give financial wellness tips along with the survey results.

“All of the participants who completed the survey not only got their financial health scores, but they also got some tips on how they might immediately be able to improve their situation. And so we looked at it as a win-win. Yes, we're getting information so that in the future we can help the members. But also the people who took the survey got interesting tidbits that they might be able to implement right away. So that was really a fun thing for us to do. And that was something that most surveys don't do.”