Banks can leverage automated and event based notifications on a wide range of messaging channels through omnichannel solutions, sharing notifications like anti-fraud alerts, balance statements, payment reminders and withdrawal notifications in a fast, convenient and secure way.
Banking and financial services cannot escape the effects of digital transformation, and they’re investing in technology to help facilitate their own and live up to a new paradigm. According to Gartner, the global banking industry will spend $519 billion on IT in 2018, up 4.1 percent year-over-year from $499 billion in 2017. The need to innovate to digitally transform spans both virtual and traditional banks. While brick-and-mortar banks must actively work toward digitization, online banks already operating via a digital model — even those natively built on digital platforms — must also modernize their communication strategies.
Keeping Pace through Enhanced Communication
Communication is key to customer experience, and customer experience is paramount to overall business success. One way to ensure two-way, secure communication via platforms that customers know and love is by implementing omnichannel solutions. Omnichannel enables banks to reach their customers through various messaging platforms, delivering custom text messages and rich content over SMS, chat apps, voice, email, notifications, and Facebook. This custom streamlined communication improves the quality of service companies deliver to their target audiences. Seamless integration of communication helps ensure an easy, modern purchasing and consuming experience for a brand’s customer base. This enables online banks to capitalize on the on-demand nature of digital models and enables traditional banks to reach their target audiences in new, convenient ways. Taking brand-to-customer communication a (necessary) step further, one aspect of an omnichannel solution banks can use is application-to-person (A2P) SMS messaging — commonly referred to as “enterprise” or “professional SMS.” This allows for a direct conversation, authentication of users of online services and delivery of time-sensitive alerts.
Sending mobile messages from a business application to a mobile user enables banks to meet customers where they’re already actively messaging. According to Deloitte’s 2018 Banking Industry Outlook, mobile is rising to the fore in consumers’ banking habits and preferences. The mobile channel is steadily replacing the branch as the focal point of the banking experience, achieving engagement even beyond that of online banking.
Both traditional and online banks should capitalize on this shift to a mobile-centric world by creating a strong mobile offering. Offering constant access, and real-time customized communication and alerts, virtual banks are attractive to today’s always-on customer. Traditional banks can tap into the many benefits of virtual banks by leveraging omnichannel solutions and implementing A2P messaging, giving them the opportunity to keep on pace with the competition and enhance communication with their target audience.
While traditional and virtual banks serve specific purposes for their target audiences, both can be enhanced by adopting omnichannel solutions and A2P messaging. Adopting solutions that share personalized messages and are delivered at the right time via the right channels will increase customer activity and communication effectiveness, ultimately bringing both online and traditional banks into the future.
