Strategic Banking Insights

DIGITAL BANKING

The Digital delivery of banking products and services is already a reality.

Like it or not, your customers will compare their digital banking experience to shopping on Amazon, iTunes, eBay, Southwest Air, etc., and to their digital experiences with large banks that already have robust digital banking offerings.

Traditional banks can’t just push out mobile apps and capabilities to customers and call it a digital banking strategy. Customers expect a seamless integration of the entire online banking experience from initiation to fulfillment. If they are forced to drop off somewhere along the digital experience to print documents, call a representative, and/or visit a branch, you have lost the customer.

The problem, however, is that if you ask a group of banking professionals to define "Digital Banking" to you, depending on who you ask, and the ages of the respondents (yes, the generational perspective makes a difference), you will likely get a wide variety of different responses to that simple question. 

To illustrate this point, in a December 2014, Digital Banking research study published by Celent, when banking executives were asked what “Digital” means for them, they responded with a diverse – and sometimes inconsistent – set of answers.  But invariably, mobile devices and social media are usually included somewhere in the answer. 

So, it would be helpful to clear up a common misconception: an organization's Digital Strategy is NOT enabling/allowing customers to use mobile devices to communicate and conduct business.  This would certainly be an element of a Digital Strategy, but the true definition of a Digital Strategy is much broader than that.