Bogotá, May 05th, 2020.- Latinia, company specializing in real-time event processing software for banking, released its annual #LatiniaIntelligentia report, this time an atypical edition disrupted by the abnormality caused by COVID-19. This document compiles data, reflections and analysis on the challenges, opportunities and transformations for the upcoming future of the financial sector due to the pandemic. This is the 12th edition of the software vendor’s report.
Under the title of: “[Covid-19] Banking and customers: from looking at each other to looking together in the same direction”, the report analyzes the impact of the virus from the perspective both of the customer and the banks, and what technologies are being protagonists, expected or unexpected. Latinia highlights these 10 conclusions in the report:
1- Branch closures can mean the end of an era (beside lowering costs), but also the entry into crisis of a model where the branch has a strong component of trust, so banks will have to renew that trust into some other concept/placements, as might be the brand or the CX
2- Senior’s unexpected engagement will force the bank to rethink the customer journey from another perspective: their motivations, like their lifecycle, have nothing to do with the rest of the public, and will require, unlike the rest, technological education more than financial one.
3- If the client does not go to the bank, physically or virtually, the bank must go to the client, because their finances are alive, they are not the same in the morning as in the afternoon, and the client expects to know what happens to their financial life…in real time. That is the new social contract between bank and customer.
4- If the App is the new bank, the user experience is the new smile of the person who attends you at the counter, the agility of your manager when faced with a problem, or the immediacy of that payment abroad, always so loaded with bureaucracy and boundless processes.
5- Social media prominence has had a double-edge sword effect. On one hand the channel has achieved the customer’s attention but on the other one has not correctly planned their massive response, provoking frustration due to the ineffective backchanneling.
6- Denied as a channel by most experts for years, e-mail has been uncovered as the perfect workhorse for communication, from institutional to operational, of matters such as office closings or modification of schedules, alternative services, or financial relief measures.
7- Electronic fraud has found the fit of its shoe with the virus, and in the segments with less financial literacy its best fishing ground: for once scam campaigns do not have to worry about generating content on a small scale, country by country, language by language, but rather the needs or fears apply globally.
8- If the debate on cash was already on the streets, the virus has raised its temperature: both cornered as a collector of germs and feared as by the risk of social exclusion that its most extreme version would entail, a cashless society wavers between a nightmare for some and the Eden for others.
9- Digital payments have experienced Covid-19 as a springboard, accelerating its pace in the continuous digital transformation of society and its protagonists, but they have not been a complete solution or an insurmountable barrier to the spread of the virus except in very specific and limited cases.
10- On what the bank does these months the client will remember years. Unlike the crisis of 2008, today consumers have financial alternatives, and their doubts are an opportunity, but also a fertile ground of reunion between bank and customer.
The #LatiniaIntelligentia 2020 report shows that the banking sector has the historic opportunity to take advantage of the complex situation that society is experiencing with the current pandemic, to define the form, channel and style with which it will interact with its customers in the next years. Technological development must be accompanied by the human touch in its message.
