The COVID-19 pandemic has put an even greater emphasis on the importance of digital optimization. Combining internal and external data enables banks to get a 360 client view and improve the customer journey. KPMG has identified six key strategic themes upon which digitalization could have a meaningful impact. In this blog, we highlight three of them.
Driving customer centricity
As we mentioned in the previous blog about digitalization in times of COVID-19, customers are becoming more critical of their banks’ services – especially when it comes to digitalization and personalization. Challenger banks remain a threat largely due to their strong focus on customer experience.
Therefore, banks should integrate internal and external data sources and leverage enablers like Artifical Intelligence and Internet of Things, to improve Know Your Customer processes. In addition, front, mid and back office should be connected to deliver seamless customer journeys through all available channels.
Converting insights from customer experiences and data into actions is crucial. Banks should use data to improve customer processes, offer personalized service, and place financials services in a wider customer-orientated context.
Controlling IT risks
With levels of remote working likely to remain higher than they were pre-COVID-19, banks may need to ‘reset’ some of their protocols and policies around access management. They should find ways to increase flexibility without compromising security.
Banks are also increasingly moving parts of their IT operations from private to public cloud environments. Those who don’t, or have not done so yet, are faced with the difficulty of maintaining their infrastructure in lockdown and other emergency situations, since maintenance is required to take place on-site. But even public clouds, where security patch management can be run remote, would have to meet very specific and stringent additional security requirements.
Reducing costs
Application rationalization is a reliable way of reducing costs and streamlining operations. It means consolidating many applications into a smaller subset of lean and cost-efficient software resources. Streamlining the application landscape is sure to result in a reduction in annual software costs.
Additionally, application rationalization is likely to generate operating efficiency by reducing the number of applications that need to be operated.
Download our whitepaper: Digitalization in banking beyond COVID-19
We now discussed three key themes. For more insight on digitalization in banking beyond COVID-19, download our whitepaper by clicking the link below. In this paper you will find more in-depth views on digitalization in the banking industry all 6 key themes.
