Banks.am presents below certain passages from the op-ed of Markswebb Research & Consulting Director Timofey Barsov, published by online magazine “Bankovskoye Obozreniye” (“Banking Review”).

Clients cover three basic needs via the bank: save money, spend money, and borrow money. In any of these cases the bank’s brand first has to pass the “reliability filter”. Depending on the need, the bank’s reliability can be expressed in different ways: the term of operation and the sized of the bank for savings, the speed and convenience of use for the spending, and honesty and transparency for loans.

Mobile bank’s interface is the face of the brand, which the client sees most often and which serves as the foundation of the clients’ opinion Naturally, it creates significant challenges for digital teams, which they have to overcome within a few years – learning to work with new tasks, new partners, and news clients (mobile interface-oriented).

New clients often assess banks by their digital services, which ought to comply with requirements and meet expectations. Although banks deal with basic financial tasks well enough, clients often have to solve more complicated matters such as account replenishment, consultation and complaints outside of digital channels.

In the nearest future almost all functions of the digital office will be transferred from hard copies, websites, contact centers, ATMs and offices into mobile banking.

How can digital teams deal with so many duties for finance management? Segmentation can help. Even the best, most perfect model of a product might not be to all clients’ liking. Don’t focus on being the best mobile banking for everyone, but try to be the best one for a specific group of people, for instance, travelers. There are several practices in the market for that particular group.

Some apps already have functions which travelers find useful: locating the client and activating the insurance only when the client is out of the country, counting PriorityPass passes and notifying how much has to be spent for another, adding the card to accounts in different currencies, etc.

However, no bank combines all these functions and meets the expectations of this group of clients better than all the other ones. Achieving such a combination is a possible vision of the future.

Digital teams need to change in order to create better products.

How exactly should they changes? First, they need to understand their new role as leaders of change and authors of the new face of the brand. It is important to build cooperation with other services of the bank and suggest efficient solutions which take into account their duties and limits. For that purpose, digital teams have to consider the client’s journey as a whole and not just the information they see in the digital channel. The teams have to be able to integrate digital and non-digital parts of the journey and understand the clients’ motivation and challenges.

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