Leda Writes for Fintech Futures: The era of indulgent clients is over
After so many years and billions spent on digital transformation: design workshops, rebuilding banks to focus on client journeys and user centred design, it’s still falling down.
It’s hard to believe that banks still don’t get it. They do. But there’s a hope that the user stuff is just user experience (UX), a bit of orchestration, a heap of data and of course pricing. Unfortunately, accounting and reconciliation, clearing and settlement, loan origination and fund accounting aren’t exempt from digital transformation.
Money moves in a cycle. Pretending that the cycle can be isolated into disconnected elements will only break the user-centric design you spent billions on.
It’s not done if only the happy path works
No matter what feature you’re trying to implement or compliance you’re trying to adhere to, it’ll never work if it strays from the vanilla experience. You might not be able to express it accurately, but you know when it’s happening.
Delays occur, the solution is through a website rather than in-app, you have to talk to a human for a workaround or the journey gets stuck in an endless loop of searching for things. System inadequacies will always occur so long as your digital efforts refuse to include your entire world.
Teach your bankers banking
Don’t blame the regulation, stop trying to teach clients how your systems work, stop insisting that internal policies are a good reason to not do something reasonable. If you have to explain how something works or why it works in a certain way or explain internal policies to a customer then you’re doing it wrong.
Clients won’t know a lot of things. They don’t know what happens when they input their pin, they might not know what happens after they take their mortgage, but they do know it’s not their job to know. It’s yours.
Don’t just teach your bankers their tiny sliver of specialisation. Teach them the entire ocean of banking. Digitalising the industry starts with the entire industry digitalising. Not someone else’s department and certainly not just the stuff on top. It needs to digitalise all the way down.
Customers expect better than what’s on offer right now. And so does the regulator. So we need to properly fix it. Fixing it means understanding it, truly understanding how the banking system works, how money flows and why.
Work starts with the client’s job to be done, not just the happy path.
Read the full story on Fintech Futures.