During the past decade, digital banking vendors have consolidated their products, services, and capabilities. However, it is important to understand that these solutions are often not designed to meet the needs of consumers. Rather, they are geared towards self-service capabilities, which are largely focused on user acquisition. This means that banks need to pay attention to their users’ needs and desires, and ask prospective digital banking vendors direct questions. Ultimately, banks should be able to obtain a digital banking platform that meets all of their needs, which can be accomplished by evaluating its functionality and customer service.
Digital banking vendors are also implementing advanced AI/ML driven digital banking platforms, which have found increasing market traction in mid-market and SMB segments across global markets. These capabilities allow banks to build a partnership ecosystem to deliver personalized customer experiences. In addition, digital banking capabilities support location sensitivity, behavioral analysis, and context sensitivity. These capabilities also create the foundation for an omni-channel banking platform. This type of platform will enable banks to create a unified, streamlined, and efficient delivery of customer services across multiple channels. In addition, digital banking platforms provide banks with an opportunity to reduce operational costs.
In order to provide consumers with a seamless experience across channels, digital banking vendors need to deliver a robust user experience. These solutions should include robust customer service, security, and certifications. To compete, vendors must deliver all of these capabilities in order to attract customers. Often, banks license digital banking products from a variety of vendors, which can lead to inefficiencies and unforeseen costs.
In order to provide consumers with an exceptional experience, vendors are also focusing on conversational agent capabilities. These technologies are helping to improve customer experience by enabling them to interact with digital banking platforms in a more natural way. Users also appreciate the convenience of accessing their accounts on their preferred devices. In addition, many vendors are investing in advanced analytics.
To evaluate the effectiveness of these capabilities, banks should ask vendors about their detection capabilities. In addition, banks should ask about their marketing support and personalization capabilities. A detailed vendor response can be used to assess the capabilities of these capabilities, as well as the ability to prevent fraud.
In addition, banks should evaluate the extent to which they are monitoring their vendor contracts. This can be accomplished by determining the monitoring frequency, monitoring impact of expiring contracts, and monitoring contract term dates. Additionally, banks should consider a single system to manage all channels, which can provide a seamless experience and reduce unnecessary costs.
Digital banking vendors may also offer software as a service. This approach allows financial institutions to gain experience and expertise in delivering digital platforms without the complexities of building them. This is a good option for smaller vendors, as it can provide a platform that simplifies the overall complexity of building digital platforms. In addition, this approach can help banks to reduce costs by avoiding the need to license digital banking products.
