To win the battle of banking, you need a digital war room

Regulatory compliance. Digitising and innovating. Meeting ever-changing customer needs. Getting ahead of the growing competition. The world of financial services (FS) has become a battleground.

As more new challengers arise, and the old guard do what they can to survive the disruption, the war in banking & FS wages on.

Enter the digital war room. Here, banks can get visibility into every single process in their business as they actually behave.

As more organisations use technology as their weapon of choice, the digital gap between legacy and challenger widens further. Gartner predicted that by 2021, 85% of all customer interactions will be managed without a human – and while banking isn’t all chatbots and paperless just yet, 90% of interactions already take place digitally, according to Accenture.

If they want to come out on top, banks need to do more than just engage customers online. They need to strategise and map out their battle plan to attract and onboard new customers digitally, while creating a speedy and secure digital experience for existing ones. That’s not to mention everything that needs improving behind the scenes to ensure they can deliver.

All of this comes down to nailing one thing: processes. Where better to hunker down and put your processes under the microscope and into action than a digital war room?

 Introducing the digital war room

The move towards a more digital landscape means banks and financial institutions alike need a better handle on their data in order to anticipate the needs of customers, make banking easier, and pursue the right partnerships to increase capabilities and scale. The sheer volume of data that legacy banks hold comes from a long history of being trusted brands for millions. But, this amount of data can be worthless if not used correctly – or quickly enough.

Enter the digital war room. Here, banks can get visibility into every single process in their business as they actually behave. They can see variances, bottlenecks, and delays, and put all this data to good use, mapping out how to better meet customer and business needs.

Process analytics can help to deliver insights from data that already exists within a financial organisation, of which legacy banks have plenty. With trends and customer needs constantly changing, it’s important that banks stay ahead of the curve by capturing meaningful insights. An example of this is delivering personalised services based on the customer profiles that banks have. They can use the data on customer preferences, buying history, demographics, and behaviour to better understand their needs.

Using these insights, banks can help to tailor products and services and deliver targeted offers that improve customer satisfaction and retention. They can also look to audience segmentation tools, already popular with fintechs, to identify inefficiencies that may be impacting their customers.

Challenger banks are renowned for their customer experience, and their traditional counterparts can easily steal tricks from the same playbook, using technology to stay on top of changing consumer needs.

Wielding the right weapons

Setting up your digital war room is only half the battle. The real challenge is about knowing which technologies to use in it. From missing loan application deadlines to technical faults when processing a payment, many things can go wrong in a bank. This is almost always the fault of bad processes. Processes might be vital to the success of banks but unchecked they can just as easily cause them to fail.

Bad processes coupled with automation can cause productivity and efficiency to take a nosedive. After all, automation isn’t the answer to every type of process glitch. Attempting to automate your processes without first knowing which work well and which don’t is a losing battle – you’ll only make bad processes bad faster. This is where process intelligence comes in as a critical component of any digital war room. Right now, only 55% of banking and FS businesses we surveyed said they frequently use tech to assess business processes. This means almost half don’t have visibility of their data and can’t spot bottlenecks and blind spots in customer interactions – not to mention in their back-end processes.

Using the right technologies in the right setting – like a digital war room, with everything laid out in front of them – is critical in helping banks nail and then automate the processes that trip them up. What the war room also does is empower your staff with oversight and control over the processes they work with every day. This means traditional banks and fintech’s can ensure their customer experiences remain a priority, and their business can thrive.

Proactive tactics, not reactive

Instead of reacting to obstacles, a war room gives banks the tools to be proactive, spotting issues or delays before they actually happen. This helps to win new customers, keep existing customers, and comply better with regulations in order to get ahead of the competition. Banks that can’t see the obstacles ahead will be slow to adapt, and many simply won’t survive.

By combining process intelligence with automation like robotic process automation (RPA), banks can shape the war room, and have the ability to predict problems plug gaps in advance and fend them off – for example by updating bots with corrective actions to fix a failing process. Without intelligent automation, banks can only be reactive, learning about problems when it’s already too late; and in the banking and FS sector, a mistake like that can be critical to survival.

As legacy banks begin to embrace the era of digital transformation to keep up with their fintech counterparts, they’re doing a lot more than cashing cheques and lending loans. But with more services and better service comes more complex processes, in the background and for customers. For many, every new obstacle feels like another battle. However, with the right technologies deployed in the right way, banks can do better business and go above and beyond for customers.

It just requires the ability to look at your processes in more detail and with more oversight than ever before, and then using intelligent automation to drive real transformation. By adopting the right technology mix, legacy banks can create a world-beating war room – winning the battle and the war.