The days of dull and simply transactional banking experiences are long gone due to changing customers’ expectations. The failure of legacy banks to recognise this shift in consumer demands has cost them a loss of market share as fintech seized the excellent opportunity to rise by offering customers what they want.

Small businesses and consumers do not have complex financial needs. They want simple solutions that make their daily lives easier. Therefore, the old model of integrating all banking services into a single digital product or brand no longer works. 

Innovative companies know this and focus on providing ease of use and convenience (with robust payment options) around a particular banking solution rather than building a multi-purpose financial product.

If you want to stand out from the pack as a bank or fintech and become the go-to brand for banking solutions, your product design and service offering must be customer-centric. In this article, we’ll look at three keys to delivering an excellent customer experience in digital banking.

Customers want Simplicity

The landscape has changed from sophistication to convenience in almost every aspect of tech-powered service delivery, from online shopping to streaming services. Digital banking service delivery is no different. 

The problem with the ‘big house’ model of banking is that it sometimes offers more than customers need, often to a point where a bank does not have a clear focus service area. 

Despite having limited offerings, neobanks have been able to capture customers away from big banks. They do this mainly by focusing on one or more service offerings and executing them better than big banks offering the same service could do. 

Since customers want simplicity, neobanks ensure their services are easy to use, tailored to solve customers’ needs in the shortest time possible and accessible via interactive interfaces. 

Top-performing neobanks further enhance customer experience by creating added value to their services, for example, by using open banking to show all bank accounts in one place. 

These enhancements simplify digital banking for the customer and encourage them to reply on neobanks for most, if not all, of their financial needs.

Customers expect a seamless onboarding experience

Real customer experience begins with onboarding. The onboarding journey defines the level of trust customers will place in your bank, not just for one product but for several other products and services in future.

While collecting enough information about the customer is essential, they will have a negative experience if they have to upload documents, wait a long time to be approved, or request additional information, delaying the process. 

In 2019 alone, the global commercial banking market reportedly lost USD 3.3 trillion due to negligence during application onboarding. A huge chunk of that loss went to the banks’ digital-first competitors, including non-banks and fintech.

Most neobanks design their onboarding process first to collect basic information like legal name, email, mobile number and phone number so the user can instantly enjoy some of their services. More detailed information, like ID verifications, would be required of the user later to access further services. 

Customers expect automatic onboarding and third-party APIs for things like ID verifications, biometrics and completing KYC/KYB checks. You can achieve this by integrating systems with compliance firms and third-party service providers. 

However, regulations change, and adapting to changing needs is important.

Good UX is often more important than complex products

Many old banks are loaded with old-fashioned, product-centred philosophies, caring little about the experience of the product’s actual users. Nowadays, users want more than just convenience from a product; they also want to enjoy the overall experience.

For digital banks, that experience means personalising financial services to customers, creating an easy-to-navigate app, ensuring financial transparency (nothing about a customer’s money and the system that manages it should be complicated), robust security, quick access to support services, and more.

All of these wrapped with simple but user-friendly UI plays a role in retaining users’ interests and having them return to the product repeatedly. 

Digital or Mobile-first design is critical as it allows consumers to use your banking services on the go. There is already a big demand for it, given that 97% of millennials reportedly use mobile banking apps, and 91% and 79% of Gen Xers and baby boomers, respectively, see the benefits of mobile banking. 

Moreso, according to the 2021 Digital Banking Report from Mobiquity, 46% of respondents under 55 would gladly switch banks to get better digital features.

Banking disruptors cracked the code years ago when they focused on delivering great customer experience, not just products and services. With this, they built active customer bases that generate outstanding revenue and valuable, actionable customer data to provide even better experiences. 

This snowball effect drives the growth of any startup.

What’s Next?

Delivering superior customer experiences in digital banking starts with improving your process flow with the customer in mind and creating features that solve real problems users experience. 

It has more to do with first-time and all-time service delivery than after-sales customer support.

While understudying your users, to begin with is a lot of work, building and launching the actual digital bank today isn’t. 

With Finslack’s beyond-banking financial engine, you can reduce the time it takes to launch your fully functioning and modern digital bank your customers would love from 18 months to a few days. 

Don’t believe us? Let’s show you how it works when you book a demo here.