Innovation moves at lightning speed – especially in finance. As an increasing number of fintech startups begin to offer more consumer-driven applications, features, and functions, the challenge is on for established businesses to get ahead too – if they want to retain their customer base.
In order to do that, they’re adopting new technologies as part of a wider digital transformation programme. Let’s consider some of the trends and look at what’s driving innovation.
Meeting Changing Customer Demands
Customers now expect a service or product that exactly matches their needs – and they aren’t afraid to shop elsewhere if they don’t get what they want. This doesn’t just apply to retail or consumer goods; financial services need to pay attention too.
Take the insurance industry for instance. Companies in the sector must provide their customers with constant support and availability any time of day or night. Speed counts for a lot too. And convenience. That’s why many companies are looking at omnichannel solutions – that can be deployed across desktop and mobile devices at scale.
Improved Customer Portals
The online interface between brand and customer is becoming the key customer experience battleground. Without constant measurement and improvement, these interfaces can become stale and irrelevant – which will create dissatisfaction for your customer.
Take our client Chill Insurance for example. We built their original customer portal over 10 years ago. Although it served them very well and enabled them to thrive in the motor insurance brokers’ market, the time came to evolve and transform this portal to give Chill Insurance even greater insight into how customers were using their service.
Through the development of a full motor quote system, we enabled Chill to generate quotes faster – vastly improving both operational efficiency and customer experience as a result. In fact, the addition of a “Save and Retrieve” feature enabled Chill to double online sales.
Chatbots
A great example of a service that’s being used in this way are chatbots – automated response AI programmes that can provide a set number of responses to common queries. In addition to being a simple way to give customers the information they need round the clock, chatbots can also be used to walk customers through a particular process – such as filling out an insurance claim – in a way that’s much easier than a lengthy phone call.
Real-Time Data Analysis
The use of data analysis is also critical to the fintech section. The ability to extract and analyse accurate data in order to get better customer insights has been a major focus of financial service for a long time. And thanks to the way that live data can be instantly accessed, they’re able to unlock relevant trends and act on them faster.
For example, within the debt management sector, we are already seeing some customers using robust analysis tools to generate heat maps to visualise everything from debt trends to rates of insolvency across the UK – with the ability to focus on specific regions.
Automation, Machine Learning, & AI
The uptake of AI, machine learning, and automation is rising too, in financial services and related areas too. Organisations dealing with contracts or settlements – such as legal practices – can also deploy AI technology to automate some of their more labour-intensive tasks.
When dealing with contracts, revisions are often made repeatedly, and each contract must be checked in full every time. With the right inputs and guidance, machine learning AI can learn to identify the changes with a much higher accuracy rate than a human being – and can work far faster and for far longer. This is a revolution for many legal firms who can use their experts for more complex tasks and leverage a flexible data platform for the lengthy validation activities.
Cloud-Driven Transformation
While all of these trends seem quite different from the outside looking in, one main criteria unites them all – the fact they all run on cloud-based servers.
Cloud software packages – such as Microsoft 365 – are a great way for companies to embrace innovation. Not only do they offer immediate access to data, they can easily integrate with a variety of apps, platforms, and other solutions. And with everything interlinked there is no broken chain of knowledge – the data needed is available on demand for developers to use in increasingly smart ways; to help companies maintain a competitive edge.
While the ways they companies use data now may be unrecognisable in five years, by staying on top of these developments those who want to excel in fintech – or any other sector, for that matter – need access to a scalable, flexible, secure IT solution that will enable them to move with the times.
With so much at stake it makes sense for companies to begin their digital transformation sooner rather than later.
ActionPoint have already helped many of our clients make the move to the cloud. We call this service Complete Cloud Migration. To take the next step on your cloud journey, click here.
