The hyper-competition triggered by the global pandemic challenges financial businesses (FBs) to not only innovate their offerings, but prioritize the user experience (UX), to truly capture the attention of the financial customer. Since, today’s financial end user prefers digital banking services, FBs must respond to this need to stay relevant.

 Digital banking solutions must pay more attention to the UX of their digital channels, with personalized offerings optimized to deliver a satisfactory user experience for each unique customer niche. Knowing this, now is the time to evaluate systems, upgrade, and integrate solutions to the wider range of consumer segments adopting digital banking, and to successfully compete in an environment of constant digital innovation and disruption.

Important Insights for an Excellent User Experience

An Financial Brand article highlights 5 key CX insights to help us better understand how to shape financial solutions for success: functionality, usability, aesthetics, status, and mission. Below we list important questions to ask and the main take-aways from the piece:

• Functionality: How to match your offering to the customer needs? “As digital solutions are constantly evolving, more and more well-thought-out multifunctional services are emerging that provide a wide range of features for their users.”

• Usability: How to empower an amazing banking customer experience? “To satisfy the growing expectations of the post-COVID customer generation, it is not enough to provide simple functionality like the most basic online scenarios. You need to do it faster, more easily and more clearly than your competitors. Instead of just providing the opportunity to transfer money using a mobile phone by filling out a long-detailed form, for example, you could offer the recipient the ability to quickly select a contact from their phone book and send money instantly.”

• Aesthetics: How to create a tailored visual identity that goes beyond the norm? “The ongoing massive improvement in the functionality and convenience of digital banking products creates the conditions for using the aesthetic value as a competitive advantage. These visually attractive products evoke more positive customer emotions than a template design.”

• Status: How to personalize with the customer experience to each customer? “Even greater value and product-market fit can be achieved by connecting the financial product with the customer’s lifestyle. It means personalizing it for a specific audience such as VIPs, families, students or Millennials. This calls for personalized, contextual banking experiences that can be empowered by artificial intelligence technology. Status provides a powerful advantage as it personalizes the banking customer experience for a specific audience.”

• Mission: How to create a community around your offering? “A financial brand with a mission creates a community around its products and turns its followers into passionate fans. By maximizing its potential, it’s possible to turn design into the company’s ideology, a cornerstone of the business DNA, as Apple did. “

In an environment as competitive as the current banking sector, these factors must be leveraged to make the digital services of a banking institution stand out from all other financial service providers, and at the end of the day, to empower the financial journey of customers.

Key UX Trends for 2021

Therefore, it is important to take into account the UX trends for 2021, in order to use them to optimize your digital banking offering:

• Contactless interactions: its popularity is a direct result of the pandemic, which has created a preference for contactless interactions using electronic devices. Functionalities, such as voice assistants, contactless transactions, and payment applications, make this engagement possible. 
• Multiple platforms and devices (Omnichannel capabilities): an essential component to a successful digital offering, for the average person owns more than 3 connected devices from which they expect to be able to perform all their financial transactions for a seamless UX.
• UX Writing: this trend highlights the importance of texts in the digital experience, and invites brands in 2021 to tell stories of their products and services, in order to create intimacy, connection, and trust with the user. This strategy urges FBs to add a banking experience embedded in personalization and humanization of the services.

What's the Take-away?

This past year has accelerated the digitization of banking, but at Cobiscorp, we’ve seen this transformation for years now. That is why we work in partnership with our clients to make them not only incredibly agile to excel through any banking evolution, but we empower them to add value and lead the market, which at the end of the day is in service of their customers.

We can help!

The digital banking customer experience trends of 2021 urge financial businesses to pivot towards greater humanization and personalization, prioritizing interactive, intimate, and simple engagement with users; to ultimately change the financial lives of its customers through a transformative banking experience rather than the simple delivery of services.

So, what are you waiting for? Contact one of our specialists to start your digital transformation journey with us!

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