Online Banking 2.0 by Feature Banking Magazine

www.banking-gateway.com Issue 1 2010 | £5.95 €8.00 $8.95 Unlock customer value We investigate how to enhance the customer experience EXCLUSIVE: Banking à la carte - Société Générale on tackling the IT infrastructure challenge in a global banking organisation Published in partnership with PLUS: OUTSOURCING • TRANSPROMO • RISK & COMPLIANCE CORRESPONDENT BANKING • GREEN IT • MOBILE SOLUTIONSFBA007 Cover2.indd 1 25/5/10 13:12:19

Customer experience management Internet banking 2.0 Since online banking became mainstream, the web has moved on. Jouk Pleiter of Backbase tells Future Banking how new thinking and technology is helping innovative banks set the pace of change. L ong gone are the days of static web pages where the tailor your iPhone based on your preferences,” he says. only thing moving was a marquee flashing “There are 80,000 apps out there and consumers can select “Welcome! Welcome! Welcome!” The modern web is which ones they want to use. We see that as being the slick, customisable and social. While networks such as future for retail banking too.” LinkedIn and Facebook are leading the way, retailers have So when customers log on to their internet banking, also reaped the benefits, and consumers expect the instead of being confronted with a standard page, they are experience of using those sites to be replicated wherever taken to a customisable dashboard. The building blocks of they are online. this environment are widgets or mini applications designed Banks, however, have been slow to make use of new to fulfil a specific purpose, pay a bill or calculate interest on technologies and approaches, despite the potential growth a mortgage, for example. Users can choose which widgets opportunities they offer. Customisation of services they want enabled, matching the environment to their empowers customers to identify their needs and mould their usage pattern. experience accordingly. In the process they send preference Pleiter describes the first round of online banking as the indicators to the bank, generating data that can be used to “web enablement” of existing services. “Traditional online drive marketing and sales activities such as cross- and banking needs an upgrade. Customers are enjoying this up-selling financial services. next level interaction with other on-line retail vendors and Interaction also holds great potential. Discussion about are looking for the same experience in their banking,” he financial products is already taking place on forums and says. “Many banks still use a flat transactional self-service using social media. Banks need to tune into those online system. They have yet to rethink their approach to conversations to understand what they can be doing better customer service when moving online and the strain is and where their competitors are perceived to have an edge. beginning to show. “Backbase enables business professionals at financial Pace of change services organisations to take the lead in customer-centric Jouk Pleiter, founder and CEO of Backbase, has witnessed online innovation, improve e-business results, and optimise the changes first-hand, having been involved in online online customer interaction. business since 1995. In recent years the pace of change has “As our conversations with banks illustrate, the online only become quicker. “Five years ago we could only banking portal has changed little over the past ten years. consume pages: we could read them and we could print In stark contrast to the one-size-fits-all approach of a them,” he says. “Today we can actually comment, provide traditional portal, Backbase allows organisations to ratings and read reviews from other users.” automatically emulate the face-to-face banking experience He characterises the first generation of banks’ online that recognises each customer’s unique financial needs and activities as a broadcast model or an inside-out approach. responds accordingly.” This mindset needs to change if they are to move forward: “To be truly successful, organisations need to be more Mash up customer-centric. Instead of talking about products or The company’s mash-up engine is the key to pulling creating portals for lines of business, they need to start everything together. It works with a bank’s infrastructure to thinking about needs and personas and looking at the serve up information through the portal and send details of customer journey.” transactions back to be processed. He describes this way of thinking as “outside-in” and the A major challenge in creating new ways for customers to first step is identifying segments of customers who have interact online is maintaining high levels of security. Backbase similar requirements and habits. Content and services can works with the bank’s existing model but complements it be repacked to target groups such as students, small with additional features necessary for the widget architecture, business owners or joint account holders, but it is possible such as strong authentication and single sign-on capabilities. to go even further and give individual customers complete Pleiter describes Backbase as a “presentation layer”, but control over how they interact with a bank’s services online. adds: “It’s not just a pretty face because you need to go one Pleiter makes the analogy with homepages such as step deeper and provide security, mash-up capabilities, iGoogle, or Apple’s app ecosystem. “You can completely content and personalisation.” 38 Future Banking | www.banking-gateway.comFBA007_020_Backbase.indd 38 25/5/10 11:47:33

Customer experience management Unlike some vendors, Backbase is not afraid to let IT aid in the setting of new business goals. The platform’s teams get under the hood of the system and let them tinker distributed architecture cuts down the lead times for at a nuts and bolts level. This might simply mean skinning projects dramatically, reducing the cost of experimentation, the portal to include branding elements, but it also opens and because the system is robust and offers a strong the door to more sophisticated development activities. governance model, IT teams can be confident handing The platform relies entirely on industry standard mark-ups control to units pursuing commercial objectives. and programming languages such as Java, .NET, XML and “You no longer have this monolithic application, instead HTML and, as with other web-native services, Backbase has you chop your services model into small components,” a completely open application programming interface (API). Pleiter explains. “It’s like Lego, the blocks operate The combination of these elements enables teams with autonomously and you can add one or remove one without standard web design skills to tweak the performance of the house collapsing.” widgets or develop their own from scratch. In addition to data and transactions, Backbase supports “The portal is like a two-way mirror,” Pleiter explains. content services, the texture around interactions, such as “On the one hand we can empower the customer, but news about products and tutorials. “We can aggregate The reality is you can’t hide anything on the internet, the information is out there and organisations need to find a way to work with it and engage in a dialogue rather than just ignoring it. Backbase is a leader in providing targeted web services. valuable information from any source,” Pleiter explains, “be that from an internal marketing department, an external supplier like Thomson Reuters, or even user-generated content where you empower the customer to contribute.” Backbase also allows banks to optimse the online customer journey, engaging people through new dialogue models, such as personal start page, live chat and co-browse, financial calculators, product finders, and other interactive applications that help customers meet their goals while creating cross-selling and up-selling opportunities. Help is at hand While flexibility and a wide range of options make Backbase a powerful tool, it also runs the risk of overwhelming a new client. To overcome this, the company has a multi-disciplinary team of experts who offer a tailored mix of user experience design services, E-business optimisation and implementation services as well as system architects and software engineers. The team can work closely with in-house IT staff to optimise the system. Backbase presents significant advantages for customers, IT teams and business managers alike. Customisation empowers account holders and encourages them to build a strong relationship with the bank. Inside the organisation, the platform’s flexibility and usability make achieving e-marketers can also sit on the other side and make objectives easier. observations to develop more targeted communication The company is presenting an innovative portal software with a particular segment or individual. solution that can transform a financial portal into a dynamic “In the past, companies had to use focus groups to get an online sales channel that drives new revenues. ■ understanding of what their customers wanted. Now they can analyse the behaviour of real users online and do so almost in real time.” Further information Business managers can feed in their ideas and Backbase www.backbase.com requirements via a dashboard similar to that used by the Tel: +31 20 465 8888 customer. Built-in analytics tools can track key metrics and Future Banking | www.banking-gateway.com 39FBA007_020_Backbase.indd 39 25/5/10 11:48:01

Online Banking 2.0 by Feature Banking Magazine

by Backbase on Dec 20, 2010

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Online Banking 2.0 by Feature Banking Magazine — Document Transcript