Pandemic Fuels Latest Tech Revolution

Bank customers have more options than ever at their fingertips—and more is on the way

BY NICK LAMBROW

WHEN THE PANDEMIC STRUCK in March 2020, the world froze. Business as usual ceased to exist. Travel halted. Commerce slowed. Schools closed their doors and opened their laptops.

Banks, however, were open. M&T Bank branches have remained open throughout the pandemic because our customers need us.

What took place during the ensuing weeks and months was predictable, considering the culture shock we were all experiencing: Activity inside bank branches dropped precipitously. At some M&T branches, foot traffic fell by more than half of what was typical before the pandemic began.

Meanwhile, online transactions with the bank shot up. More people downloaded the M&T mobile app and visited the bank’s website to conduct their routine transactions such as transferring funds and paying bills.

Neither trend was unexpected. Advances in technology and awareness of customers’ changing behaviors were already guiding us toward providing a more digitally focused experience for our customers. Before the pandemic, we started down a path to alleviate sticking points between bank branches, customer call centers, and our online banking services so our customers could bank with us in ways that were more convenient to them.

The pandemic added rocket fuel to the trip we had planned to take. Our customers—in particular, small-business owners struggling to stay in business— needed to interact with us, and they wanted to do it from the safety of their kitchen table or makeshift home office.

The pandemic showed us that we had to take the bank to our customers—and we had to do it as quickly, efficiently, and effectively as possible. We couldn’t rely on our customers to seek us out inside a bank branch.

The pandemic showed us that we had to take the bank to our customers—and we had to do it as quickly, efficiently, and effectively as possible.

We organized our work around three objectives:

1. Expand the number of ways our customers can connect with us. For example, we began offering digital appointment instructions in six different languages and held virtual appointments via Cisco’s Webex platform. Through the first eight months of 2021, more than 85,000 appointments were scheduled online—6,000 of them in Delaware. More than 13,000 of those customer interactions took place on Webex from January through August, with 1,000 of the virtual meetings with customers in Delaware.

2. Offer more information online to help our customers manage their finances. One way we did this was to partner with a fintech company to build digital demonstrations of transactions such as depositing a check using M&T’s mobile app and sending a Zelle payment. We now have more than 40—and counting—digital transaction demonstrations on our website that can be shared with customers online or shown in our branches.

So far this year, more than 380,000 digital demonstrations have been viewed by M&T customers—about 21,000 of them in Delaware. Not surprisingly, our most-viewed videos cover how to enroll in online/mobile banking, how to deposit a check using M&T’s mobile app, and how to transfer funds within an account.

3. Modernize our existing capabilities to make banking easier. We updated our mobile account opening platform and launched M&T Money Smart, an online dashboard that allows customers to track all their finances (even those numbers in M&T accounts), customize a budget, set savings goals, track spending, and more.

We also evaluated the services we offer to our customers inside our branches and added the capability to access many of these online tools while working with one of our branch employees. The face-to-face interaction is still relevant and important to many M&T customers, so we sought to enhance our offerings within our branches to meet the needs of those customers too.

In planning for a post-pandemic future, our mission remains the same: Understand what’s important to our community of customers to create simple and intuitive solutions, enhanced by the care of our team, so they can make the best financial decisions. n

Nick Lambrow is the Delaware regional president of M&T Bank.