Picking a bank used to be about things like who had the most conveniently-located branches, the best opening hours, and the most ATMs. Then, challengers flipped the script and took the fight online.
A top notch digital banking experience is now more important to consumers than having a branch close by. And 86% will start thinking about switching if your digital offering doesn’t meet their expectations.
But what does a “top notch digital banking experience” actually look like? Who does it best? What drives people to your bank and earns their loyalty, and what puts them of?
Short of opening an account with all the banks in the world, it was impossible to answer these questions. So, in 2011, that’s exactly what we did. We started joining banks, analyzing their digital profiles, and documenting our findings.
The result —
Here’s a look at how it works.
Every time one of your digital banking users wants to reach a goal — open an account, order a debit card, or apply for a loan, for instance — they have to take a series of steps. These steps are called the User Journey.
10 different users will have 10 different goals, but they all have one thing in common. They want to reach their goal as quickly as possible. And the longer and more difficult the user journey is, the more likely they are to get frustrated and abandon the process.
FinTech Insights maps out all the user journeys on a specific bank’s digital platform to the last detail — from initial onboarding, login, and security, to alerts, customer support, open banking, and any extras.
Each step is mapped out on a flowchart, so you have a visual representation of what it entails:
More to the point, the flowchart lists every single action the user has to take to complete a journey.
Let’s say the user has to hover the cursor over a text box, click on it, and type some information.
This means you get to experience the user journey exactly as a customer would, including their pain when there’s friction that makes the process harder than it has to be.
Flowcharts make it easy to understand how a bank or fintech takes their customers through a specific user journey, because you can see all the steps at a glance.
But how do you evaluate how user-friendly — or frustrating — that journey is? And how do you compare different banks and fintechs to find out who does it best?
Enter our Perfect 1000 system.
The Perfect 1000 system is a scoring mechanism that quantifies how much effort a user journey entails. The idea is to make evaluating a user journey and comparing how different banks and fintechs tackle it as simple as possible.
Let’s say you want to find out what opening a savings account online is like with banks X, Y, and Z.
Each bank’s account-opening journey starts with 1000 points. For every step you have to take to reach your goal, FinTech Insights deducts points.
Our matrix deducts points based on how simple or complicated a step is. So, requiring a user to key in their name, date of birth, and address, for instance, could lower the score by 10 points. By contrast, if there’s a several days long wait for documents to be verified, that could slash 50 points off the final score.
At this point, you may be asking:
What’s the perfect score?
And the simplest answer is: there isn’t one.
Not all customers perceive a user journey the same way, because they have different preferences and priorities. So while phoning customer support to resolve a problem may be a no-no for 18 to 34 year olds, for instance, it may be a plus for customers over 65.
Similarly, uploading a selfie will be simple for some users and a strange, unfamiliar process for others.
Our Perfect 1000 system is designed with this in mind. You can pick which steps and user journeys to prioritize, and these will be worth more points. In the same way, steps or user journeys that are a lower priority for you will be worth less points.
The upshot is that you can customize the analysis based on what’s important to your users, or study what a particular segment of customers expect when banking online. This means you can tailor your findings so they inform the goals you want your bank to achieve — attracting more customers under 40, for instance, or making your digital banking platform more accessible to older customers.
If customers increasingly value a quality digital banking experience, the vast majority aren’t getting what they expect. In a 2019 study, only 28% said they were happy with their bank’s digital offering.
FinTech Insights can help you understand how your competitors are doing things, so you can be inspired by their successes, learn from their mistakes, and build a platform that attracts the other 72% to your digital doorstep.
Want to learn more about how FinTech Insights can help you attract that 72%? Then go ahead and book
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