Open Banking: The Race for Customer Share
New European regulation PSD2, and the extensive accompanying digital transformation, has set the stage for a financial ecosystem evolution.
Open banking is a concept transforming the financial services industry, with an important impact on customer experience. The effects will be felt at the enterprise level as banks and financial institutions change the way they operate and reorient toward the consumer, pressured by the emergence of consumer-facing FinTechs. In the new paradigm, customer experience needs to align globally across multiple platforms and channels while responding to changing customer and regulatory conditions more quickly than ever.
As mobile and digital continue to be consumers’ preferred banking methods, innovative services need to be developed and incorporated to optimize the end-user experience. Banks in particular need to deliver mobile-friendly, dynamic products and branded content in the language of their customers if they want to retain and gain market share. FinTechs need to consider the scalability of their platforms and cross-border appeal from the start.
Open banking allows for more integrations with open APIs, more white labeling, and customized offerings that will be stickier for target clients that have more banking options than ever. Open APIs perform the important function of exposing the core services of banks and other financial providers so third parties can integrate services and data to create value-added offerings for customers. The goal is to streamline and simplify how we select and consume products and services in day-to-day life. This means that a retail bank customer may access complementary third-party services via their primary bank.
Customer Loyalty and Appeal: Internationalized
In the battle to build brand loyalty with diverse customers, localization and testing of content in the user interface is often overlooked. More than simply translation, a true customer-centric strategy includes a focus on monetizing new customers and increasing usage and customer share of the current client base with a localized experience that is automated and tested.
For example, once you localize text into French and Dutch, are you following a script on the mobile phone to ensure every button is responsive and the content reads appropriately? Have you thought that within one country you may have thousands of potential users that are non-native speakers of the primary language and engagement would increase with additional language options? Is your app suite strategy responsive to a localized experience?
As flexibility and choice define the customer journey, and the mobile interface is the key element for building loyalty and trust, banks and FinTechs need to deliver mobile-friendly and dynamic content in the language of their customers. To do so, they need to evaluate current and target demographics, gather analytics (for example, from search per country/region/language), and have a defined strategy to deliver content in-language to users without losing functionality.
Starting with in-language SEO that places a premium on updating keywords and search terms for ideal customers, leading brands leverage content automation platforms to get to market faster and eliminate costly internal processes. GlobalLink provides API integration with 40+ content platforms to enable rapid localization, while Applanga allows agile app localization across iOS and Android. As banks prepare for the future, customers will look to apps for easy, intuitive financial management.
For open banking to revolutionize the marketplace as consumers graduate from local banks chosen for physical convenience or legacy, leaders will put the best localized products and content in the hands of their customers regardless of location, building loyalty and trust to sustain growth.
