The financial sector has faced some major difficulties in recent years, with increasing costs, tightening regulation, disruptors, and a talent scarcity that has made every change a challenge. The industry’s finally starting to catch up though, with tech and AI bringing new solutions to some of the biggest hurdles being faced.
We attended the 2023 Money 20/20 Europe event to learn about – and help shape – the future of CX and compliance for the financial world. We wanted to share five key take-aways from the event and the conversations that happened in the halls, corridors and meeting rooms in Amsterdam.
The current state of play
As anyone knows who works in our industry, the financial sector has faced some challenges in recent years, driven by increased regulation and heightened consumer demand for more efficient and convenient service.
Disruptors offering alternative payment platforms and varied payment methods are transforming the market, and their 24/7 accessibility is changing the way consumers view the sector. Branches and proximity are no longer primary decision criteria, but the overall customer experience – whatever the channel used – is.
While financial services (FS) organizations have been left floundering, today they’re increasingly exploring options to address these challenges. Let’s look at a few initiatives:
AI has compliance built in
If we take banks as an example, AI is a solution that many are investigating to help meet their compliance requirements. As we’ve discussed, it has been challenging for banks to keep up with and comply with increasingly stringent regulations, and getting the right talent in the right place at the right time has been an ongoing issue.
One of the main benefits of AI from a bank’s perspective is that it can be designed with compliance at its core. Today, the creation of financial apps and platforms can completely integrate the necessary data-gathering and enhance the customer experience at the same time.
Using modern technology, banks are now able to collect the data they need to meet new KYC regulations. An AI solution is able to log, sort, and categorize data into a structured, easy-to-read form, which can then be verified by a human to ensure it meets the correct standards.
It’s obviously critical that teams have a good understanding of how the AI is working, and its decision-making process, but the technology has the potential to enable massive progress.
AI could be the perfect partner for CX
In terms of what the customer experiences, AI opens up endless possibilities for increased efficiency. It offers enhanced data and insights on customer needs and behaviors, which allows organizations to meet customer needs and increase engagement in some unprecedented ways.
Firstly, there’s an opportunity to increase conversion rates and massively accelerate onboarding processes without sacrificing the ability to comply with regulations.
They can also gather more data than ever before and use it to better understand what’s happening in the customer journey. By identifying areas for improvement, they’re able to create more rewarding customer journeys, which lead to improved customer satisfaction and increased loyalty. They can also leverage data to constantly refine the products and services they are offering.
Your tech needs to be future-proof
As financial services organizations have made efforts to adapt to compliance requirements and tailor their processes, they have increased the workload for their backend (often legacy) systems. Those legacy systems often lack the agility to cope with the greater complexity and sophistications required.
2023 is already seeing a focus on improving efficiency and reducing costs for financial services organizations across the board. Increasingly, they are using modern technology to consolidate and simplify their systems, and standardizing data to make it easier for both machines and human team members to handle it.
But all of this needs human talent at the heart of it. Under discussion at Money 20/20 was the war for talent and the limited amount of expertise that is able to bring about the digital transition in banking. The danger of a tech bottleneck, as digital demand grows but the numbers of high-tech talent remains stagnant, is very real.
As a business facing up to regulatory changes and infrastructure transformation, it’s absolutely crucial now – and even more so in the future – that you have a digital talent strategy in place to deliver it all.
Customers want to know where their money is going
In the past, being sustainable was an option, an extra that some used to attract customers. Now, FS organizations need to bring sustainability into the spotlight. In recent years, there is an appetite for sustainability amongst customers across all sectors – including financial services – with a resulting focus on environmental, social and governance (ESG) practices.
There’s increased scrutiny on where organizations are putting their money, what they’re investing in, and how they are giving back. With many making pledges like net zero emissions by 2050, it’s important to consider all the implications of this.
Organizations need to be looking at things like their own practices, their customer interactions, and the companies that they interact with and invest in. Things like paperless banking and transactions are a starting point, but many are now looking into green financing and ethical investing, particularly in an aim to appeal to the younger demographic.
There are also the huge implications of climate change over the next few decades. McKinsey Global Institute estimates that the net-zero transition could require $275 trillion in spending on energy and land-use systems between 2021 and 2050, averaging $9.2 trillion per year.
Banks and financial institutions will play a crucial role in this transition, one that will be driven by regulatory pressures as well as the opportunities of new business opportunities. To succeed over the next decade and beyond, businesses must embrace transparency and ESG, and allow smart use of data to guide their financing activities.
How are you building compliance into every interaction?
As more and more players enter this space with innovative apps and solutions to solve a wide range of problems, the BFSI sector looks set for continued growth. However, the cost of compliance is also climbing in the face of increasingly stringent regulations across the globe, as is the cost – and complexity – of delivering CX during periods of rapid growth.
All this means that businesses will need to find a way to deliver great CX that is built around their compliance playbook, cost-effectively. Enterprise AI solutions are likely to be part of the solutions, but humans still play an integral role in both CX and compliance, ensuring great CX and compliance in the face of heightened and evolving regulations.
Webhelp is at the forefront of customer experience, helping financial sector organizations to blend the best of people and tech to improve CX and meet compliance requirements.
If you’d like to find out more about how we can help your business balance the competing drivers of cost, quality and risk to deliver game-changing CX with your compliance playbook built in, please get in touch.
