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Over the last 8 years of my career I have had the pleasure for working for some of the largest fintech companies where I was responsible for selling, implementing, and directly solving operational issues for many of the largest banks and credit unions in North America. My primary focus was digital channel solutions which specifically was mobile, online banking, e-payments, and e-funds movement (ACH, wire transfer Zell, etc.) I’ve supported and worked with over 7 distinct online banking systems and 3 different mobile banking solutions that integrate over 20 different core banking processing systems. I have met with literally hundreds of executives from banks and credit unions in one on one meetings, quarterly business reviews, sales meetings to displace the competition, and many user group based client forums, etc. These meetings all focused on their current and future needs of their digital banking solution, their operational day to day support issues, and their overall customer satisfaction. Recently, I’ve had a number of banking executives ask me if there are some common themes or nuggets of wisdom that can be distilled down from all these meetings with these Financial Institutions (FI’s). The short answer is Yes. However, before I go into more detail, I want to clarify what this article is and isn’t. This isn’t an article that gives a detailed breakdown of all the different types of mobile and online banking features and functions supported in a digital banking application. There are many articles and publications that have recently been written giving this type of information. What this article attempts to do is to give the top insights, themes, and even concerns that frequently came up from these digital banking executives during my meetings about their digital banking vendor and about the competition. Digital banking vendors are defined as the company by which these FI’s have purchased a licensed or hosted version of the vendor’s retail or commercial banking platform which is also referred to as their mobile and online banking platform. I’m going to attempt to distill down the top focus areas. I’ve also listed them in priority of importance which is based solely on my opinion. I would love to hear from anyone who has a different order or even a focus area that isn’t listed. 1. Innovation. Digital banking executives always want their digital banking vendor to be a leader when it comes to innovation. They want to speak with industry leaders from their digital banking vendor who can tell them where the industry was heading, trends being identified, and how this lines up to their vendor’s vision, product roadmap, and overall digital banking and e-payments strategy. They want their vendor to show them how something would work in the product with actual use cases so the digital banking executives could touch it and get an understanding for how this innovation might work for their customers. They obviously wanted to know if this innovation could be monetized for revenue purposes, meaning, could the FI actually charge a fee to its customers. In general, most FI’s do not charge their customers a user’s fee to use mobile and online banking applications anymore. However, within the mobile and online banking application, there are certain features that if a customer chooses to use may have associated fees tied to it. Most FI’s in general don’t immediately embrace and adopt innovative technology when it’s leading edge. Most FI’s like that their digital banking vendor supports innovative leading edge features even though it may be a year or two before the FI will actually implement and roll out this feature. The reason for this is a mix of some FI’s just not being able to move quickly and also most FI’s aren’t an innovation leader, but more of an innovation fast follower. This creates a big conundrum or disconnect between the FI and their digital banking vendor to innovate and develop features immediately within their product when they know that most FI’s won’t typically implement this feature when available. Why build it immediately if adoption may lag behind for 12 – 18 months? Most FI’s like to wait and see how the largest mega FI’s like Chase, Bank of America, Citigroup, Well Fargo, etc. adopt and roll out innovative features first before they then decide to implement it. Digital Banking executives will always choose safety and security first over innovation. In general, this is just the nature of Banking when it comes to banking via the digital channel. Highly innovative features that are proven safe, secure, and simple for consumers to use that also drives convenience at the “speed of now” tend to get rolled out and implemented faster. FI’s like the thought of knowing that their vendors have the ability to rapidly respond to innovation, if needed, even though the speed of an FI rolling out innovation is typically lagging. Despite this, mobile channel innovation trumps all other banking channels. 2. Integration. Digital retail banking executives are desiring more and more flexibility from their vendors in order to mix and match best of breed solutions and not be locked into one vendors entire digital banking solution. They want “plug and play” modules of function that have an open API so that they can easily integrate with another vendor or be able to develop their own solutions to easily integrate to these systems. Once again, this creates a conundrum between the FI and their digital banking vendor who doesn’t want to make it easy to mix and match best of breed solutions with their digital banking platform unless there is a valid business cases to do so and by their choosing. In some cases, this makes it even harder for the digital banking vendor(s) to support the FI, yet gives the FI more flexibility of choice and lessens its total dependence on having just one digital banking vendor. 3. Intuitive design and a great user/customer experience. I can’t stress how important it is that FI’s want and need their mobile and online customers to have a great experience when utilizing their digital banking solution. It’s all about ease of use and the customer having a positive experience because the app was so easy, intuitive, yet powerful in terms of function and features. Easy, intuitive, and powerful are difficult to attain and maintain when it comes to digital banking apps. It has to be easy to use, efficient, intuitive, and optimized to utilize a feature in a few clicks. Users need to be able to use a new feature that they have never used before and have a great experience where they say “that was so easy to do on my phone!” 4. Meet and deliver on your product road map. Digital Banking executives need their digital banking vendor(s) to meet their published general availability dates on their product road map. Missed product delivery dates by the vendor(s) cause a ripple effect within the FI having to adjust their own internal QA and testing of the application. It also causes issues in the timing of how the FI announces and markets these features to their customers. This also negatively impacts the confidence that the FI’s executive management team has in their digital banking vendor(s) ability to execute on product delivery dates. 5. Knowledgeable and accessible subject matter experts in Customer Support. The complexity of a digital banking application is typically made up of many product management and development teams each focused on their area of expertise such as, P2P payment services, account core processing, card services, bill pay services, credit score info, personal finance management (PFM), account statements, remote deposit capture, etc. This can even be further complicated because some functionality is possibly being provided via a third party vendor, for example, remote deposit capture, credit score, and PFM solutions are typical third party embedded solutions. Many times an FI calls to say that X feature in their mobile application is down or not working. Despite knowing what feature is not working, it simply takes time to triage and do the initial trouble shooting, incident management, and root cause analysis to figure out which product or module is actually causing the issue in order to then resolve the issue. Having knowledgeable subject matter experts being able to quickly identify the problem and being able to directly interface with the FI’s support staff is so invaluable these days to service a customer quickly and to achieve high client satisfaction levels. 6. Relationship Management. Keep your commitments and promises. Digital banking executives desire all direct client facing resources from their vendor supporting them to be highly responsive to the extreme where it really borders on being proactive. They want all the vendors’ client facing teams to be coordinated internally, highly attentive and having a level of empathy and understanding that sometimes is lacking from the vendor. When this is done well from the vendor, only then does the FI have an overall perception that their vendor truly cares and is easy to do business with. This “perception” by the FI that every team or group within the vendor genuinely cares about them manifests itself into a tangible and positive CSAT and high Likely to Recommend (LTR) scores. Relationship management becomes a true team effort that is made up of all direct client facing resources that includes the client partners, service and customer success managers, technical account managers, customer support executives, and even the vendor’s executive level management team. The digital banking executives are always measuring and tracking each incident as to how their staff perceived the level of the vendor’s service and engagement. For example, how responsive, coordinated, status of timely updates, and how empathetic their vendor is for each and every issue being logged and tracked through to resolution. I can’t stress enough that if a vendor says they are going to do something, then it better be done to honor and keep these commitments. This goes a long way to building meaningful and loyal relationships where you are not just a vendor, but someone they trust. Honorable Mentions Here’s a couple of honorable mentions that didn’t make it for top themes or concerns, but are areas that have been trending up enough to at least mention. Mobile Banking App Store Ratings More and more digital banking executive are taking an active interest in what their App Store Ratings (Android and iOS) are for their Mobile Banking app. App Store Ratings serve as a big indicator of how well your mobile users like or dislike the FI’s mobile banking application. This has a huge correlation to how innovative the FI is being perceived and how good or bad the customer experience is with their FI’s digital banking channel. Users can leave comments and direct feedback of what features and functions work well or ones that don’t work and why they are giving the mobile app a certain rating. Once again, the mobile channel trumps all other banking channels these days. Another point is that smaller and mid-size FI’s want to know why their mobile app store rating is significantly lower than other FI’s that are essentially using the same hosted mobile digital banking application that the digital banking vendor sells except for changes likes company logos and branding. Why is their App Store Rating below the average of the App Store Ratings of the other banks or credit unions using the same mobile application? These FI’s are turning to their digital banking vendor to partner with them to create and implement an App Store Ratings improvement program. Zero down time maintenance windows and cloud based hosting. I’m combining these two trends together because most of the digital banking vendors will greatly reduce their application maintenance windows by moving to a private or public cloud based infrastructure. Currently most digital banking vendors have regularly scheduled maintenance windows for doing server management, upgrading software, installing new hardware, security patches, etc. These maintenance windows can be bi-weekly, monthly, or quarterly and normally take place for example on Sunday mornings between 2am – 6am ET. The issue is that most digital banking vendors have to take the application totally down or offline at some point during this maintenance window which means that some transactions aren’t happening real time and/or are being stored in a batch file to be processed later when the application is back on-line. Sometimes to further complicate these maintenance windows, unplanned and unscheduled emergency security patches must take place which can be very disruptive to the FI’s application and support teams. Digital banking today means that an FI’s customers can literally be anywhere in the world and wanting to pay a bills or transfer money at any time and from anywhere as long the customer has a Wi-Fi connection or a network carrier signal. This creates a customer support issue for the FI where they can have extremely frustrated customers that have been greatly inconvenienced because they were trying to do their normal banking activities using their mobile or online banking application while they are in Europe, Hawaii, or in Asia during normal local time zones only to be told that their mobile banking application is down for maintenance. This becomes even a bigger and more complicated issue if the digital banking vendor exceeds the allotted time of the maintenance window. Cloud based hosting will make substantial improvements to lowering maintenance windows and even possibly getting maintenance windows to zero down time. All digital banking vendors are working on solving this issue. Some digital banking vendors are farther ahead of others and others are lagging behind, but this is a priority for all of them. Summary The first 4 items (Innovation, Integration, Intuitive design, and Road Map) are all product, product management, and development related and the next 2 items (Knowledgeable Customer Support and Relationship Management) are support, service, and customer success related. I believe that one of the primary reasons why there are so many great digital banking vendors like ACI, Alkami, Alogent, Apiture, Backbase, Kony, Finastra, Fiserv, FIS, MX, NCR, and Q2 are in the market today is that each have their own unique strengths that focus on speed of innovation, integration, and a highly intuitive user interface that allows for a great user experience. End users have come to expect and even demanded that their digital banking application must inherently have these qualities and are just expected to be the norm. Many of these digital banking vendors don’t own a core account processing system, yet have built a digital banking platform integrating to many 3rd party core account processing systems. It used to be almost a no brainer that FI’s would almost always choose the same vendor for both digital banking platform and their core account processing vendor. However, this is not the case today. This tells us that the most successful Digital Banking vendors in the future must be leaders in innovation, yet open to integration. They must be strong in their Product management and development capabilities. They must have the ability to execute their vision of having feature rich functionality with a great intuitive user interface. Lastly, they must offer great support and service management in order to make and keep their customers successful. THE END