The Bank of the Future Depends on These Three Crucial Factors

In 2016, Adobe sur­veyed senior man­agers at more than 20 glob­al banks in order to bet­ter under­stand what the “Bank of the Future” might look like, and how we can work togeth­er to get there sooner.

A pow­er­ful over­all trend emerged right away: the Bank of the Future will be based around pro­vid­ing out­stand­ing mul­ti­chan­nel cus­tomer expe­ri­ences, fueled by data inno­va­tions that dri­ve per­son­alised inter­ac­tions across all touch­points. To reach that stage of dig­i­tal trans­for­ma­tion, senior man­agers agree, banks will need to replace anti­quat­ed sys­tems and un-silo their data.

The exact steps to these changes, how­ev­er, vary wide­ly from bank to bank—as do the oppor­tu­ni­ties each bank sees in its own near future. Here’s how top finan­cial insti­tu­tions are allo­cat­ing their dig­i­tal trans­for­ma­tion pri­or­i­ties over the next five years.

Per­son­al­i­sa­tion priorities

More than half of sur­vey respon­dents said that “pro­vid­ing con­sis­tent high-qual­i­ty cus­tomer expe­ri­ences” was their num­ber-one over­all pri­or­i­ty over the next five years. This in itself might come as no sur­prise, but the fact that bankers rat­ed expe­ri­ence far high­er in impor­tance than “deep­en­ing exist­ing cus­tomer rela­tion­ships” or even “grow­ing client base” points to a new awak­en­ing toward the cen­tral­i­ty of the cus­tomer expe­ri­ence in the dig­i­tal sur­vival of any bank.

When asked what their organ­i­sa­tions were actu­al­ly doing to enhance the end-to-end cus­tomer expe­ri­ence, a full 40 per­cent replied that they were focus­ing heav­i­ly on mul­ti­chan­nel ana­lyt­ics to bet­ter under­stand the cus­tomer jour­ney and attribute the impact of each mes­sage. This pri­or­i­ty ranked far above per­son­al­i­sa­tion of con­tent or eas­i­er form expe­ri­ences, but it’s like­ly that banks’ improved ana­lyt­ics will soon reveal the impor­tance of these tac­tics as well.

Many banks’ pre­lim­i­nary research has already begun to gen­er­ate rec­om­men­da­tions for dig­i­tal ser­vices that will enhance their cus­tomers’ expe­ri­ences. In those new ser­vices, banks see oppor­tu­ni­ties to strength­en cus­tomer relationships—provided the tech­nol­o­gy is applied in rel­e­vant ways.

Tech­no­log­i­cal opportunities

With­in the next five years, near­ly 60 per­cent of banks plan to offer instant peer-to-peer pay­ments, while 40 per­cent already offer this ser­vice. Sim­i­lar­ly, more than half of senior man­agers sur­veyed plan to offer dig­i­tal receipts for all pur­chas­es, intel­li­gent spend­ing break­downs, inter­est pre­dic­tions, and real-time spend­ing noti­fi­ca­tions; although com­par­a­tive­ly few banks offer these ser­vices today.

Oth­er key areas of focus are mobile wal­lets and pay­ments and bio­met­ric authen­ti­ca­tion for account secu­ri­ty. More than 20 per­cent of senior bank man­agers are plan­ning to roll out account aggre­ga­tion ser­vices at some point in the next five years, while many oth­ers plan to lever­age more per­son­alised dig­i­tal cross-selling—particularly on mobile—to grow their cus­tomer bases.

How­ev­er, these rosy pre­dic­tions are also shad­ed by real-world lim­i­ta­tions, most notably tech­no­log­i­cal and bud­getary ones. Bank man­agers’ reports on these bar­ri­ers paint a clear pic­ture of the areas where change is need­ed most.

Bar­ri­ers and budgets

When it comes to bar­ri­ers, near­ly 35 per­cent of man­agers agree that “anti­quat­ed core sys­tems and dis­parate data sources” are pre­vent­ing them from deliv­er­ing on their pri­or­i­ties for the next five years—far more than any oth­er lim­i­ta­tion. This means that any bank hop­ing to pro­vide data-dri­ven dig­i­tal ser­vices is going to need to un-silo and cen­tralise its cus­tomer data on a secure plat­form, and inte­grate that data into robust organ­i­sa­tion-wide cus­tomer pro­files. Many banks have tak­en only the first steps along that path, and much work remains to be done over the next five years.

How­ev­er, many banks are already allo­cat­ing bud­gets for dig­i­tal ini­tia­tives­lack these cen­tralised cus­tomer data­bas­es. Near­ly 60 per­cent report that per­son­al finan­cial man­age­ment tools are at least a medi­um-lev­el bud­getary pri­or­i­ty, while more than 40 per­cent report invest­ment in bio­met­ric authen­ti­ca­tion. Sim­i­lar­ly, high per­cent­ages are also invest­ing in chat bank­ing, wear­ables, mobile geolo­ca­tion, social chan­nels, and even aug­ment­ed reality.

While these dig­i­tal-first pri­or­i­ties are admirable, they’re all found­ed on the eas­i­er shar­ing of data between depart­ments, and the replace­ment of lega­cy sys­tems with inte­grat­ed plat­forms that sup­port mul­ti­chan­nel data inte­gra­tion and ana­lyt­ics. Senior bank man­agers who pri­ori­tise cus­tomer pro­file cen­tral­i­sa­tion on an organ­i­sa­tion-wide scale will be the true win­ners over the next five years, because every dig­i­tal ser­vice they pro­vide will be dri­ven by a deep under­stand­ing of their cus­tomers’ finan­cial needs and goals.