The financial market isn’t your grandpa’s fuddy-duddy paper-pushing bank anymore. Instead, it’s a fast-growing market with fintech & banks moving at breakneck speeds. Very soon, branches and operations centres could be staffed by robots instead of humans, and customers could be taking financial/insurance advice from an AI app – across currencies, borders and with just a few taps of a screen. This future is already happening. If you’re part of the financial sector, you’re probably equal parts excited about what’s ahead and anxious about falling behind in the tech race.
On the 10th of March 2021, Meiro in partnership with ADA Consulting held a webinar that shed light on the current and future disruptions in the BFSI space and shared tips on navigating through it. The webinar was moderated by Yih Cheng Yak (YC) Director of Business Solutions at ADA, the panel also hosted Keith Lee, Head of financial services, Business Insights at ADA, Pavel Schamberger, Regional Manager of Home Credit and Manish Gambhir, Business Solutions Manager at Meiro.
Keith kicked off the webinar with a short presentation on the trends in digital disruption. The first trend that Keith spoke about was the shift to digitising onboarding to financial services, that due to COVID, was soon becoming non-negotiable. Keith noted the issues faced during these times such as the barrier of face-to-face interactions, difficulties in collecting documents and signatures – that digitisation could solve and even help in significant cost-savings. The second trend was striking a balance between financial inclusiveness and creditworthiness, which brought solutions to unbanked individuals and SMEs that did not possess historical records but still posed a great opportunity with easy-to-use digital solutions. The proliferation of Insurtech was the third trend that Keith spoke of with the new audiences demanding convenience, speed and seamlessness from insurance products. Keith closed with a look at the growth of different offerings in the FSI sector, and a look at how establishing foundations today could establish the future – with a total digital customer banking experience.
Question Round – Which trends are going to stick with us
In the next segment, YC posed a few questions – starting off with what digital disruptions would stay for good and have the biggest impact in the FSI sector?
Pavel answered that the transformation of going from the collection of fingerprints to digitised KYCs with selfies and transforming the customer experience of counter interactions into a digital interface would be one such massive digital impact. In addition to using data to assist credit scoring and the consolidation of financial services into super apps that could create better customer experiences. Pavel also spoke about improving the customer experience by streamlining the digital onboarding process – shortening the steps and removing obsolete requirements.
The next question that YC posed to Keith was what changes should companies in BFSI take up that would help them thrive within the current digital disruption trends? Keith mentioned that one of the aspects was that organisations should look at more non-traditional financial roles that could bring behavioural changes to the organisation culture such as data scientists and IT professionals. On the tech side, Keith spoke about un-siloing data to complement cross-selling and upselling efforts. In addition to financial institutions using their wealth of data to be able to hyper-target customers and come up with personalised financial offerings and ensuring data security & compliance.
Manish then offered his take on how AI & Machine Learning could lead the way, talking about how data led the way – financial organisations should realise and activate the power of their data. He stated that the first step of owning cleaner, richer data was vital to machine learning, and only then could ML lead to predictions and improvement of systems.
The next question was with the amount of data at banks’ disposal – how would customer’s concerns be protected? Pavel spoke about how the enactment of GDPR was initially seen as a concern, but with time could be seen as an advantage that companies could leverage by offering transparency to customers, and allow them to share data on their terms to bring more ease to their lives through improvements.
Manish took this opportunity to show how data could help a use-case with the help of Meiro CDP. Using the example of a single customer, he showcased the ‘Single Customer View’ that featured comprehensive info from the user profile to device IDs, to information on customer service that helped bring value through exclusion-based marketing practices. Going even further into information into what campaigns the user was exposed to, when and which touchpoints were used and more. All of this comes together to form a timeline that becomes useful for activation by BFSI organisations. He explained this further by showing how all of these qualifiers helped segmentation down to a granular level that helped maximise ROI and prevented wasted ad spend. He explained how clients had experienced a reduced cost per acquisition of customers by consolidating identities and were also able to improve customer experiences.
What advice would they give to a professional working in the BFSI sector to adapt to this digital disruption?
As the webinar drew to a close, YC prompted the last piece of advice from our panelists. Pavel recommended getting comfortable with data – using it to glean insights from all the data coming through relevant touchpoints. Keith agreed and stressed the importance of organisations staying agile enough to keep abreast of technological advances, and always having the right expertise to do so. On the marketing side, Keith spoke about the necessity to be able to hyper-segment customer data through first-party data and from data from partners. Manish spoke about ‘always thinking like a customer’ – analysing the ‘how’, ‘what and why at each step on the internet and learning from them. As well as being data-first and demanding and chasing data from their organisations to improve their strategies and processes.
Watch the webinar
Read the summary, but want the whole experience? Dive deep into the discussion with the whole video of the webinar here, as Manish, Keith & Pavel detail the world of digital disruption. Watch it in full here:
