A recent BAI Banking Outlook study identified three areas among the top business challenges and priorities for financial services leaders: acquiring new customers, enhancing the mobile channel experience and making better use of consumer data to improve products and service recommendations.
Consequently, financial service organizations are digitally transforming every aspect of their business—from consumer-facing mobile applications to back-office workflow optimization—to meet the increasing demands of the market and maintain evolving service-level agreements and compliance regulations. But if innovation can increase productivity and save costs, many banks still fail to use artificial intelligence and automation to their full potential.
Here, we look at how mobile onboarding and processes intelligence can improve customer acquisition and enhance the experience.
Digital savvy meets customer onboarding
Consumers told BAI that they want the ability to start in one channel and finish in another without starting over. This omnichannel experience typically begins with mobile; however, studies show 40 percent of consumers abandon applications after initiating the process. This contributes to the $98 billion left on the table by companies that fail to provide simple experiences.
Banks most often cite the complexity of digital forms and heavy requirements for manual typing as the biggest barriers to onboarding customer information. Requiring the consumer to download a native app to complete these processes often presents another barrier. Banks that focus on eradicating these barriers to improve customer acquisition enhance their digital channels with more sophisticated mobile capture technologies.
With intelligent mobile capture, for example, banks enable customers to focus their smartphone’s camera on payment slips, invoices, ID cards, passports or other documents they need to submit, and capture information directly into the fields of your back-end systems for further processing—with no extra steps to download an app.
Mobile web capture solutions allow customers to use a web browser on their mobile device to automatically capture images of documents in real time and quickly complete the sign-up and account opening processes. This technology consistently allows banks to provide a smooth customer onboarding experience with higher completion rates.
Here, AI technology detects real-time mobile input of relevant data; it provides speedy retrieval of image files and minimizes the steps required to fulfill a task—paving the way for maximum ease of use.
Onboarding’s digital transformation doesn’t end with customer acquisition. To fully succeed and earn customer trust and loyalty, financial institutions must track, monitor and act on customer processes before they spin out into a negative experience.
Operational efficiency through process intelligence
The financial services industry hinges on highly process-oriented service; however, banks struggle to review their processes completely. Most think they know the inner workings but oftentimes their view doesn’t match reality. Organizations should address this critical pain point—blind spots and all—and assess the need to diverge from original processes.
New advanced machine learning technology called process intelligence (PI) empowers banks to analyze less structured processes, identify improvement areas and increase the speed and accuracy to execute the process, making better customer experience possible.
The industry’s complex workflows across departments, people and even locations are well documented and recorded. Every action, event, or transaction goes into a log along with other important attributes that describe who did what, where they did it and many more operational details. These workflows typically span different systems that do not all link perfectly, thus creating information silos and an incomplete picture of businesses operations. These factors, taken with the industry’s variance in day-to-day processes, make it tough for banks to determine what an “as-is” state actually looks like.
Without a clear picture of process execution, leaders have struggled with answers to vital business questions. How do they ensure processes are followed according to plan? How do they even know the what and how of those processes?
Process analytics delivers sophisticated, data-driven insights. With the right technology, leaders can now see the end-to-end process in its “as-is” state. This proves especially important given some of the largest contributors to financial industry waste: handoffs for approvals, requests awaiting processing, and customers stuck in queues.
Parting thoughts: Efficiency fuels the future
It’s important to find the exact point where process problems arise. Banks can easily discover bottlenecks and deviations, which helps uncover exactly where these handoffs occur and how long requests wait. Armed with such insights, you can zero in on more specific solutions.
Further, financial services can use past and current performance metrics to guide future performance. Workers can feel more confident in their decisions and depend on predictions powered by machine learning to produce the best chances for success.
The focus on mobile to acquire customers more efficiently, along with tracking various processes initiated by mobile and other channels—account opening, crediting, loan applications, payment, mortgage processing among them—depends on AI. Banks that effectively leverage AI in their digital transformation journey will in turn enhance how employees work and customers transact—in a word, transform it.
Anthony Macciola is the chief innovation officer at ABBYY.
