COMMENTARY: DIGITAL ONBOARDING
The COVID-19 pandemic has fuelled an historic shift to digital, as consumers the world over rely on contactless options for everything from essential shopping to managing their finances. Yet, many financial services providers are struggling to meet this surge in demand for digital services head-on, according to research by digital consultancy Mobiquity. It studied more than 50,000 UK customer reviews of banking apps within the Google Play and Apple app stores to see what ‘frictions’ most got people’s goat. Its findings are a wake-up call for providers that haven’t yet taken note of the seismic shift in customer expectations and grasped their digital strategies by the horns. Mobiquity’s Friction Report To Benchmark UK And NK Mobile Banking Apps found the biggest problems surrounded authentication. Almost a third (30 per cent) of digital banking app customers experienced issues logging into apps through their devices. One in five (20 per cent) had issues with username and password or passcode authentication. However, customer service also left a lot to be desired, with almost a quarter (24 per cent) of customers waiting too long for it and a fifth (22 per cent) feeling their issues went unresolved. Mobiquity’s vice president of global financial services, Matthew Williamson,
Peter-Jan Van De Venn, Strategy Director of digital consultancy Mobiquity, says the pandemic emphasises the need for banks to create human-centric, digital solutions in imaginative ways said of the report: “As the use of digital payments increases during the pandemic, so has mobile banking usage. “Nowadays, banks cannot risk treating their customers as passive observers, building products and features that do not take their feedback into consideration.” Committed to ‘developing solutions to get to the heart of what customers need and want by combining strategy, creativity and engineering’, Mobiquity is determined to help banks do something about these somewhat alarming trends. Its website states: “COVID-19 has changed customer expectations around experience and the ability to receive a fully digitised and paperless service, with the decline of in-branch customer interactions.” And improvements in onboarding are among the most urgent needs, as banks seek to preserve their bottom lines in a volatile economic environment by attracting new customers.
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TheFintechMagazine | Issue 18
This has increased the need for banks to implement digital onboarding to respond to these expectations, along with the ability to stay adaptable for future pandemics and crises that require social distancing and digital-only services, believes Mobiquity. And the real trick is to do all of this in a ‘personal’ way, or as the company puts it: “At the same time, for banks to retain their customers they must ensure their digital onboarding is human-centric, translating the customer relationship from the physical to the digital world without losing the connection.” Mobiquity’s strategy director Peter-Jan Van De Venn describes why improving onboarding is so vital: “Onboarding is the process with the biggest drop-offs because it’s still necessary to get a lot of information and people don’t like that, so the easier banks can make it, the better. “It’s more important these days, not just because people expect it, but the pandemic means there is an extra demand to onboard new customers without having people in branches. “We [only] see demand increasing, but there are still many banks that don’t
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