The Future of Retail Financial Services - Pega

The Future ofRetail Financial

Services

A global study of 500 senior banking and

insurance executives by Cognizant, Marketforce

and Pegasystems

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Foreword

Organizations operating in the retail financial services sector – banks and insurers – need to work smart and fast to keep pace with their gadget-happy customers. We may have a 24/7 love affair with our smartphones but it is clear that in the future we will be sharing information and making payments via fitbands, cars, TVs and white goods, as the Internet of Things fuses the physical and digital worlds. For incumbent banks and insurers, the challenge will be to leverage the possibilities of this new hyper-connected world to embed themselves in their customers’ daily lives. This partnership between customer and provider will be a key defense against the growing ranks of digital newcomers seeking to disrupt and dislodge incumbents through an array of innovative and smart new offers.

Cognizant, Marketforce and Pegasystems combined forces to investigate how the retail financial services sector is preparing for these threats and opportunities. Our survey makes interesting reading: organizations are aware that serial waves of disruption leave them little option but to change their operations but, worryingly, we find too many are moving too slowly, either from an excess of caution or complacency. This report should serve as a wake-up call: organizations need to accelerate their change programs or risk finding their customers have already moved on.

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Executive Summary & Key Findings

A customer revolution is underway, overthrowing established business models and fueling disruption. Financial services organizations must change how they operate to ensure they emerge on the winning side. Banks and insurance companies that cannot keep pace will find their customers, busy pursuing flawless service models and smart solutions, have moved on without them and they are stranded on the wrong side of the digital divide – from which there will be no return.

For while consumers still have the same financial needs – to access credit, pay their bills, plan for retirement – it is no longer clear that they need an incumbent financial services provider to fulfill these needs. And customers, it seems, are increasingly happy to build their own bank, cherry picking the services they want from an array of brand-smart, digitally savvy new entrants – and, in the process, unpicking the value chains that underpin existing insurance and banking models.

Our global survey shows organizations are working hard to stay current but remain adrift of many key innovations, from extreme personalization to blockchain technology. Worryingly, many of our surveyed organizations do not expect to achieve key digital markers for another five years – but by 2020 it may already be too late.

Our key findings show a sector alert to the challenges and opportunities of ongoing digital disruption but equally aware that legacy constraints and a risk averse culture mean they are trailing innovation pacesetters in fintech. Increased collaboration between incumbents and fintech1 will be essential to ensure the best ideas get the capital, scale and speed-to-market to continue to delight customers.

Into which of the following categories does your organization most naturally fit?

Banking Consumer Finance Financial Advice Investment Management Insurance Payments Other

How significant a player is your organization in its principal market?

Top 10 player Top 20 player Top 50 player Outside the top 50 players

Key Findings

Customer experience: staying relevant

Organizations are scrambling to remain relevant to new customers: 79 per cent agree that their organization will have to change its operations significantly over the next five years to keep pace with customers aged 18-25.

Customer experience: omni-channel

Today’s customers expect a flawless end-to-end experience across all channels, yet fewer than 4 per cent of our respondents say they have achieved full omni-channel integration. Organizations are looking to make good on this

expectation, however: by 2020, 89 per cent of our respondents expect to achieve full omni-channel integration. This either suggests a massive surge of investment over the next five years – or an industry in denial about the scale of the task ahead.

This omni-channel offer is in a state of flux, as technology gives rise to new channels and renders others obsolete: 73 per cent expect to integrate wearables into their channel strategy within five years and over the same time frame 70 per cent expect video chat to largely replace branch appointments. Indeed, six out of ten now believe a digital-only channel model is viable.

1. Fintech is the shorthand term used to describe the thriving technology start-up sector that is incubating disruptive new models for mobile payments, money transfers, loans, fundraising and asset management

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Internet of Things: moving from price, to value

The Internet of Things (IoT) promises another tidal wave of digital disruption but one that could provide real opportunities for financial services organizations to better understand and serve their customers:

» 93 per cent agree that finding innovative ways to provide value-added services to customers based on data-driven insight will be crucial to long-term success

» 86 per cent agree that once consumers recognize the data potential of the IoT they will increasingly seek to benchmark their own behavior against their peers

Wearables: payments on the go

The IoT could transform payments, enabling frictionless on-the-go payment. Our respondents predict rapid take-off as consumers embrace the convenience of payment-enabled wearables: 20 per cent expect it to be common for consumers to make financial transactions using wearables within one year, 59 per cent within two years and 91 per cent within five years.

Other connected devices will also be payment-enabled by 2020: 87 per cent expect it to be common for consumers to make financial transactions using Smart TVs and 68 per cent via home appliances.

Insurance Rebooted: from grudge purchase to long-term partnership

This has clear implications for insurers, enabling them to not only improve underwriting, manage risk and offer dynamic pricing but also build long-term relationships with customers in what could be a once-in-a-generation opportunity to move beyond the annual grudge renewal. More than half our respondents expect the majority of insurance policies in Household and Health lines to be dynamically priced based on data from

connected devices within five years, rising to 77 per cent for Motor carriers.

Indeed, there is the potential for a complete rethink of the relationship between insured and insurer, with data providing the bedrock of a partnership where both parties work together to make life better. 80 per cent of our respondents believe most insurers will regularly provide personalized risk information to their customers and that pre-emptive risk management, rather than just providing compensation, will become core to the insurance value proposition by 2020.

Personalization: the customer of one

In an age of extreme customer expectations, organizations need to use accelerated data flows to offer personalized experiences and frictionless service. This is on corporate agendas, with three-quarters of our respondents expecting to offer full personalization, and 83 per cent planning to predict individual requirements within five years.

Yet legacy systems remain a roadblock to full personalization: 85 per cent said a lack of single customer view prevented a high level of personalization and more than eight out of ten are struggling with data processing, analytics and access to sufficiently rich customer data.

Securing access to this rich data will require an understanding that data is now a commodity, which consumers guard and monetize on their terms. Organizations will need to have strategies to access data and engage with the rise of the Personal Data Store: 79% believe personal data stores will be commonplace within five years.

Self-service customers

Systems must also be readied for the rise of the DIY customer, with connected consumers increasingly keen for self-service options in their dealings with financial services providers. Yet just 38 per cent of our respondents can meet a majority of customer requirements through automation as 94 per cent say legacy systems are the main bottleneck in meeting customer demand for full self-service.

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When self-service options stumble, customers fall back to the safety net of the contact center, where computer-generated recommendations are seen as a significant solution to Customer Experience (CX) problems: 85 per cent agree that increased use of computer-generated recommendations in contact centers would reduce errors and ultimately improve customer outcomes. Yet, despite this compelling business case, our findings show budgets have not yet been unlocked, with just one in five making extensive use of computer-generated recommendations to guide contact center staff.

Avatars, robots and Siri

Customers are increasingly happy to engage with non-human interfaces to resolve their service issues: 76 per cent agree the widespread use of virtual assistants such as Siri on the iPhone means customers are more willing to engage with automated assistance and advice.

This could be a profound change: almost three-quarters of our respondents agree that in the future customers will interact with a human-like avatar until they reach the point of needing to speak to a real person.

Blockchain: on the radar

Not only must banks and insurers battle rising customer expectations and fierce competition from new entrants but they also face a possible extinction-level threat from blockchain technologies. 60 per cent believe that blockchain, a distributed public ledger which can securely record any information and the ownership of any asset, will prove to be the most significant technology development to affect financial services since the Internet and 45 per cent think the combination of blockchain wallets and peer-to-peer (P2P) lending could herald the end of banking as we know it.

While few companies are taking action yet – indeed 35 per cent of our respondents have

never heard of blockchain – those who do have some knowledge of it see rapid adoption among consumers:

» One in five (22 per cent of our respondents) expect it to be mainstream practice for consumers to hold most of their financial assets in a blockchain wallet within five years, rising to 55 per cent in ten years and 71 per cent in fifteen years

» 12 per cent expect the settlement of insurance claims using IoT data, blockchain and smart contracts to be mainstream practice within two years and 74 per cent expect it to be mainstream by 2025

» 42 per cent say it will be mainstream for consumers to hold their personal data, including ID, in a blockchain within five years

An appetite for innovation?

This all suggests that financial services organizations continue to face relentless and significant disruption. The response must be ongoing innovation in order to keep pace with new entrants and ever-changing customer behaviors. Yet this is an industry that is averse to the kind of risk taking that fosters true innovation: only 30 per cent of our respondents said their organization would tolerate a 50 per cent failure rate on innovation pilot projects and more than six out of ten believe their governing board should set the failure rate for innovation pilots much lower, below 30 per cent.

This runs counter to the fact that respondents overwhelmingly agree that innovation is essential to keep pace with customers in a changing world: 98 per cent agree that the key to successful value proposition innovation in retail financial services is to think beyond traditional industry boundaries to identify new ways of meeting consumer needs. True innovation is a mindset that doesn’t merely extrapolate today but completely rethinks tomorrow. Achieving this will mean new ways of working, of designing systems and of leadership.

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Towards an Omni-channel Customer Experience

The Internet of Things – The Next Phase of Digital Disruption

The Future of Personalization

The Future of Customer Service

Is Blockchain the Next Big Disruption?

The Innovation Imperative

Conclusions

8

13

19

23

28

33

38

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Chapter One

Towards an Omni-channel Customer Experience

Research suggests customer-centric rhetoric is, at last, translating into improved customer satisfaction: one customer service index found that customers of UK banks and building societies, for example, are more satisfied than they have ever been2, while beleaguered insurers have seen a welcome rise in Net Promoter Scores, if not yet loyalty3.

There is, however, no scope for complacency as customer expectations, shaped by disruptive digital frontrunners, outstrip the capacity of institutions to keep pace. Research suggests too many banks are out of touch with what customers really want: one survey found 62 per cent of retail banking executives believed their bank offered excellent service compared to just 35 per cent of customers4. And even when financial firms appear to be getting it right, customers are still willing to stray in search of something new or better as customer experience initiatives, once cutting-edge, quickly become yet another hygiene factor for the connected customer5. And those customers are online, on the phone, mobile and in-branch – and expect their financial services providers to keep pace with their unique multi-touch-point journey.

This matters because customer inertia has been replaced by customer activism: dissatisfied customers not only share their experiences via social media but also show growing propensity to switch providers. Incumbents are at the sharp end of the new switching economy as digitally-savvy new entrants snap up restless customers6.

Millennials: Generation Disruption

This trend will only intensify as Millennials, often referred to as Generation Y and loosely covering

those born between 1980 and 2000, come into their own, as trendsetters and spenders: research by Standard & Poor’s expects this will hit from 2020 when, in the US alone, Millennials will have annual spending power of US$1.4 trillion and represent 30 per cent of total retail sales. The rise of this influential generation should put incumbent financial institutions on notice: Millennials not only have an appetite for disruptive new technologies but also an affinity with brand-savvy digital leaders with the capacity to innovate, excite and engage. Low fee peer-to-peer models and crowdfunding platforms clearly strike a chord with a generation hard hit by the financial crisis and subsequent recession.

The Millennial Disruption Index, a three-year study of industry disruption conducted by Viacom subsidiary Scratch, found that banking was most vulnerable to disruption from this, the largest generation in American history. Some of the findings make bleak reading for incumbent banks struggling to stay relevant: one in three said they were open to switching banks in the next 90 days; a similar proportion predicted they wouldn’t need a bank at all in five years’ time; and an alarming three-quarters said they would be more excited by financial services provided by Google, Amazon, Apple, PayPal or Square than from their own banks. This suggests incumbents cannot underestimate the threat posed by these digital leaders when it comes to the Millennial customer.

agree that their organization will have to change its

operations significantly over the next five years to keep pace

with customers aged 18-25

79%

2. UK Customer Satisfaction Index (UKCSI), Institute of Customer Service, October 20153. Consumer Intelligence report, published in Insurance Times, February 20154. Banking Redefined, IBM, 20155. Few people display unwavering loyalty to their provider, and two in five banking customers state they would consider switching their account to

another provider, according to a 2014 report from YouGov6. A Uswitch.com survey found that satisfaction with big banks is falling across the board allowing new entrants to sweep up votes

Seven years on from the financial crisis and under the continued glare of regulatory scrutiny, financial services organizations are working hard to make good on promises to put the customer first.

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Our respondents clearly recognize the growing power of this generation and the challenge of meeting their still-evolving needs: eight out of ten agree that their organization will have to change its operations significantly over the next five years to keep pace with customers aged 18-25.

There is no shortage of research into the Millennial customer and while the picture will continue to evolve as the generation matures, there are some clear preferences:

» For the generation that sleeps with their smartphone to hand, technology solutions must be user-friendly, secure and reliable – always

» Value for money really matters: Millennials shop around and will trade data for discounts

» Self-service is increasingly preferred for speed and convenience

» Human interactions still count and should be personalized and authentic

For financial services organizations, seeking to emulate the customer-obsessed experiences pioneered by digital leaders like Amazon, this “Millennialization” trend has clear operational implications:

» Flawless omni-channel service will increasingly be a hygiene factor as customers fuse their online and physical experiences

» Product and service innovation will be essential as Millennial customers reject high fees unless they see clear value in return

» Technology solutions must support self-service, whether the customer is online or in the branch

» Recruitment, training and employee reward structures must focus on delivering genuine personal interactions, with front-line staff supported by computer-generated

recommendations and holistic real-time customer data

Millennials may find digital their natural comfort zone but they do still seek out human contact, particularly in moments of financial stress or when making more sophisticated decisions7. Indeed, some research suggests Millennials, particularly those aged 18-24, place real value on talking to real people: one survey found the availability of real people to talk to topped brand and quality of digital services when selecting an insurance provider8.

Millennials: the “omni-generation”

For this reason, financial institutions seeking to court this generation must provide a flawless omni-channel service. Other industries have already uncovered the bottom-line benefits of providing a seamless transition between channels. In the retail sector, for example, shoppers who buy in-store and online have a 30 per cent higher lifetime value than those who shop using only one channel, providing a real incentive for retailers to invest in technology solutions that enable customers to convert on any channel9. Financial institutions are not immune to these trends: one global study found that omni-channel customers not only give their bank a higher Net Promoter Score but also hold more products with their primary bank than digital-only or branch-only customers.

This virtuous circle of engagement cannot be ignored by financial services organizations as they seek to retain market share in the face of fierce competition. Research found that globally more than one third of customers bought a new banking product at a bank other than their primary bank in 2014 and this rate of invisible defection will only accelerate as digital start-ups with smart solutions make it easy for customers to defect. In response, incumbents will need to build a flawless omni-channel offer: seamless, simple and personal experiences with a smart digital component that acts as a gateway to other products.

7. A survey by Capital One Investing found Millennials seek out financial advisers in times of market volatility8. Born Yesterday: Will Millennials Disrupt the Insurance Industry? Pegasystems, 20159. IDC 2015 from Google

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How much progress has your organization made in achieving a seamless customer experience across all available channels?

Already achieved full omni-channel integration

Integrated most channels but not all

Integrated a few channels but not all

We have not integrated any channels

Not applicable - we have only one channel

Fewer than 4% have achieved full omni-channel integration...

Yet our survey finds this is still a work in progress for most retail financial services organizations: just under 4 per cent of our respondents claim they have achieved full omni-channel integration. And while 85 per cent have integrated at least some channels, there is still a resistant 10 per cent that have yet to integrate any channels at all, leaving their customers exposed to inconvenient and inconsistent service. This is already a frustration for customers: one study found that customers typically use two communication channels to resolve customer service issues and more than half said they frequently received conflicting information from the different channels10.

...but in five years’ time 89% expect to get there

Financial firms are clear, however, that this is not sustainable and the vast majority are now investing heavily to close the gap with the frontrunners: more than half (53 per cent) of our respondents believe they will achieve full omni-channel integration within two years and 89 per cent will get there within five years.

How soon do you expect your organization to achieve full omni-channel integration?

Within 6 months

Within 1 year

Within 2 years

Within 5 years

Within 10 years

Never

New channels, new customers

These investments must include new and emerging channels in order to stay relevant to the on-the-go consumer. Although the smartphone remains the consumer’s device of choice, and is likely to remain so for some time, market penetration of wearable devices is accelerating: worldwide shipments topped 76 million in 2015, up 163.6 per cent on 2014 and will hit 173.4 million in 201911. This is not just a consumer-led trend: by 2018, Gartner estimates that two million employees will be required to wear health and fitness tracking devices as a condition of employment.

For now, consumer adoption of wearables is dominated by fitness trackers, largely because of their focused use and accessible price points, but a tipping point is approaching: smart wearables are forecast to take the lead in 2018 as advancements in user interface and functionality drive uptake.

expect to integrate wearables into their channel strategy

within five years73%

These forecasts should serve as a wake-up call for financial services organizations. Just nine per cent of our respondents offer wearable devices as a channel and a further seven per cent have pilots under way. This is clearly on the industry’s

0 10 20 4030

10. The Millennialization of Customer Service, Nuance White Paper, 201511. International Data Corporation Worldwide Quarterly Wearable Device Tracker, September 2015

0 10 20 40 50 6030

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radar, however: almost three quarters (73 per cent) expect to have integrated wearables into their channel strategy within five years.

Frontrunners are already trialling wearable devices to communicate and serve their customers: in Singapore, for example, Mercedes Benz Financial Services (MBFS) has launched an app for Apple Watch allowing customers to receive up-to-date information on their finance contracts through a simple glance at their wrist, including the number of remaining payments on an instalment plan and the next payment due date. There is a clear appetite for this, with nearly one in three of MBFS’ customers currently active users of this wearable account management tool. Financial services organizations that fail to keep pace with customer appetite for smart wearables could find it is a competitor that steals this opportunity for a 24/7 connection with the customer.

More clicks, less bricks

Customers, even Millennials, still crave the human touch when managing their finances yet the bricks-and-mortar branch and the much-despised call center too often leave them dissatisfied by their experiences. Bain & Co estimates that 50 – 70 per cent of call volumes at a typical bank are bad or avoidable12.

Many routine interactions work better and cost less when handled digitally: certainly the uptake of online and mobile banking suggests customers like the convenience of having their finances at their fingertips. Indeed, banks that encourage branch use may actually be driving customers away: in the US, frequent branch use correlates with an almost three times higher likelihood of switching than infrequent use13.

Technology can be used to reduce branch visits: Barclays, for example, is trialling the use of mobile check deposits, which allows customers to pay in checks by sending a digital image of the check

from the camera on their smart device. One survey suggests 75 per cent of consumers would welcome the options to deposit checks using their smartphones14.

expect video chat to largely replace branch appointments

within five years70%

Video chat, a channel that customers have embraced in their personal and work lives, can reduce branch visits while still delivering human contact: Dutch bank ABN Amro, for instance, has been advising on and processing mortgages via webcam so that customers do not have to physically hand over documents at a branch, while Barclays is rolling out a 24/7 video chat banking service that lets customers communicate with employees from their mobiles, tablets or laptops. This could lead to a rapid drop-off in branch use as our respondents see video chat going mainstream within five years: almost one third expect video chat to largely replace branch appointments within two years and 70 per cent expect this to happen within five years.

believe a digital-only channel model is viable64%

Indeed, as new human-centered digital channels emerge, the long-predicted demise of the branch could enter its final stages. A digital-only channel model looks increasingly viable according to 64 per cent of our respondents. In the UK, digital-only start-up Atom has received regulatory greenlight from the Prudential Regulation Authority (PRA) and Financial Conduct Authority (FCA): there will be no branches, with Atom operating entirely through an app on a smartphone.

12. Customer Behaviour and Loyalty in Retail Banking, Bain & Co, November 201513. Bain & Co, November 201514. Survey by Intelligent Environments, July 2013

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Given the lower cost to serve and the reduction in petty frustrations that can arise from branch interactions, those that back a pure digital offering could start to open up clear blue water between those still tethered to a bricks-and-mortar network. Given the pace of change, institutions must be prepared to have all models on and off the table.

Operational next steps

Our findings make clear that financial services organizations have a long way to go to meet the omni-channel expectations of today’s connected customer. For the 96 per cent that fall short of full omni-channel integration, the key message must be to start now and work fast. And that work must target true omni-channel integration rather than just adding new channels to the existing muddle: the projected proliferation of connected devices and customer channels means multi-channel strategies will be increasingly unworkable. Organizations must build a single architecture channel strategy that combines consistency with flexibility in order to deliver a seamless customer journey across existing, emerging and yet-to-be conceived channels.

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Chapter Two

The Internet of Things – The Next Phase of Digital Disruption

In 2016, 5.5 million new things will get connected every day, with 6.4 billion connected things in use worldwide, up 30 per cent from 2015. By 2020, there will be 20.8 billion connected things15. And this is only the beginning: Cisco estimates that 99.4 per cent of physical objects that may one day be part of what it calls the “Internet of Everything” are still unconnected.

This tide of data opens up opportunities for financial services organizations to find new ways to understand and engage customers. Asking the right questions of the right data will allow companies to transform the customer experience by anticipating their needs, personalizing products and providing dynamic pricing. Digital leaders such as Amazon, Google and Uber understand the power of data, and they use its insights to deliver smart and intuitive technology solutions and superlative customer experiences. It is one reason why their entry into financial services is so feared.

While incumbents are not defenseless - banks and insurers have their own treasuries of customer data - unless they keep pace with the IoT , they will be blind to much of the data their customers are generating as they move through this new hyper-connected world. As data-driven insights power business transformation, from risk prevention to hyper-local personalization, the gap between the “data haves” and “have nots” will widen, marking a clear divide between the winners and losers of the IoT age.

agree that finding innovative ways to provide value-added services to customers based on data-driven insight will be crucial to long-term success

93%

Yet just as data goes into hyperdrive, so consumers are rethinking the data free-for-all. Unnerved by high profile data security breaches and armed by increasingly stringent data protection regulation, customers will increasingly only allow access to their data when they trust a counterparty and see clear value in return. Banking and insurance providers cannot afford to be shut out of the data marketplace – they must build trust through transparent policies and robust systems and find new models to motivate customers to share data. Few disagree with this: nine out of ten of our respondents agree that finding innovative ways to provide value-added services to customers based on data-driven insight will be crucial to the long-term success of their organization.

The wearable devices market already shows, however, that customers are comfortable sharing data when its collection is in tune with their own personal goals. Mass-market apps like Jawbone UP59 and Fitbit60 demonstrate consumers will wear gadgets to capture a wide range of data points about their day to day activities in return for insights into their personal health and fitness and that of fellow community members. Indeed, benchmarking is a popular way to engage customers and incentivize positive behaviors: Jawbone, for example, reports that when community members have three or more friends on their team, they move at least 10 extra miles a month.

agree that once consumers recognize the data potential

of the Internet of Things, they will increasingly seek to benchmark their own

behaviour against their peers

86%

A new hyper-connected world is emerging. A torrent of machine-to-machine (M2M) communication is now being added to the vast volumes of data generated by our digitised payments, social media postings and web movements.

15. Gartner, November 2015

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This data-for-insight exchange offers a clear model for the financial services industry in the age of IoT, allowing banks and insurers to embed themselves in the lives of customers by providing meaningful communication that adds real value and promotes engagement. Indeed, peer-to-peer benchmarking is expected to be a consumer-driver trend that will facilitate data sharing: certainly 86 per cent of our respondents believe that once consumers recognize the data potential of the IoT they will increasingly seek to benchmark their own behavior against their peers. Gamification techniques will make this form of data-sharing enticing and engaging, allowing drivers to use data from in-car telematics to rank their driving against other policyholders or householders to use data from smart energy meters to compete on energy-efficiency. As data becomes a commodity, those organizations that can offer real value to consumers in return for access to their data, be it insights into their own behavior or that of their peers, will be rewarded by joining the “data haves” of the future.

Pay-as-you-go, any time, any where

The IoT is building a world where everything, from the clothes we wear, to the cars we drive, the gadgets we use and the buildings we live in, are connected and transmitting data about our routines, our habits and behaviors. This proliferation of connected devices has clear implications for enhanced payment capabilities, enabling frictionless payments for consumers on-the-go through near-field communication (NFC) facilities or at home through smart appliances.

This is still an emergent trend. Cards remain the go-to payment option but there’s clear appetite for more convenient options than chip-and-pin as consumer comfort with contactless cards grows16. Payments via mobile phones are already growing: according to one survey, the number of people in the US using their phones to pay for goods and services at the point of sale will continue to climb

steadily, with 2016 set to see significant growth with the total value of mobile payment transactions expected to surge 210 per cent as nearly one in five smartphone users make mobile payments17. As contactless and mobile payments become mainstream, it will allay consumer caution about making payments using other connected devices.

Wearable fitness trackers are an obvious entry point. In the US, fitness tracker Jawbone has already linked one of its devices, the UP4, with mobile payment capabilities through a link-up with American Express. Disney’s MagicBand, meanwhile, is an example of a wearable success story: the contactless wristband for its theme parks and hotels can be used as a room key, theme park ticket and payment account as well as enabling personalization of the guest experience. Apple Watch already acts as a portable payment device in the UK and the US through Apple Pay. Further ahead, a Canadian start-up is developing the Nymi Band, currently undergoing pilot testing with MasterCard, using biometric security based on the customer’s unique heartbeat, a solution that could overcome the latent security concerns of consumers.

believe it will be common for consumers to make

financial transactions using wearables within five years

91%

It is not just fitbands and smart watches that could have a payments capability. Smart garments could also be heading to the high street as the technology emerges from the testing phase and is promoted through uptake by athletes and coaches18. Indeed, Barclays has already teamed with Lyle & Scott to develop a NFC payment capability built into the sleeve of a jacket.

16. According to the UK Cards Association (Kevin Jenkins, MD UK & Ireland at Visa Europe in The UK Cards Association press release, September 2015), the number of contactless transactions in September 2015 topped 103.2 million, up 220 per cent over the year, with touch-to-pay now being described as the “new normal” in the UK

17. Emarketer, October 201518. Gartner, November 2014, believes smart garment shipments will grow from 0.1 million units in 2014 to 26 million in 2016

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“How soon will it be common for consumers to make financial transactions using the following?”

Within 1 year Within 2 years

Within 5 years Within 10 years Never

This is early days but our respondents predict rapid take-off as consumers embrace the convenience of payment-enabled wearables: 20 per cent expect it to be common for consumers to make financial transactions using wearables within one year, 59 per cent within two years and 91 per cent within five years. Banks are ahead when it comes to wearables: 26 per cent of banks are already using or piloting wearables as a customer communication or service channel compared to just seven per cent of insurers, even though there are clear benefits to insurers to offer pay-as-you-go cover using data from wearables.

Given limited adoption to date, this suggests the field remains open for the industry to regain the payments initiative and establish an early mover advantage in wearable payments for the connected customer.

Into the smart home

expect it to be common for consumers to make

financial transactions using Smart TVs within five years

87%

In the home, meanwhile, tech giants are already rolling out smart home kit, including intelligent thermostats, smart meters, smoke alarms and lighting systems while white goods manufacturers are adding sensors to washing machines, dryers and fridges. Many households already have a Smart TV – one with built-in internet connectivity allowing it to access a range of online services – and already tech companies are developing allied payment services. Samsung, for example, has developed a TV version of Samsung Pay for its Samsung Smart TV, allowing owners to associate a credit or debit card with the payments service so if they see an app, a game or other item they just press the “Pay Now” button and enter a security pin to purchase it from the comfort of their sofa. Our respondents clearly see this appealing to consumers: while just 12 per cent expect this to be a common feature within one year, give it a further 12 months and more than half expect it to be common for consumers to make financial transactions using Smart TVs, rising to 87 per cent within five years.

think it will be common to make payments through

smart appliances within five years

68%

Payments via white goods appliances and smart home controllers will be slower to take off: only 5 per cent expect these to be common within one year, rising to 23 per cent within two years and 68 per cent within five years. Even so, the fact that more than two-thirds of our respondents expect consumers to be commonly making payments through a smart appliance by 2020 is a sign of just how quickly the IoT could revolutionize all aspects of daily life.

Banks must be alert to these developments: if a bank’s app rather than an inbuilt payment system is used when your smart refrigerator orders milk, the bank owns the data and the relationship,

Connected white goods/ smart home controllers

Wearabledevices

Connected cars(e.g. at petrol

stations)

Smart TVs 0

20

40

10

30

50

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creating new opportunities to gain insight, engage customers and remain relevant.

Insurers: building new relationships

For the under-pressure insurance industry, the IoT will undoubtedly be a data shot in the arm. A sector that has seen margins shredded by a fire-storm of price-driven competition and spiralling claims costs is being presented with a one-time-only opportunity to reinvent itself: rather than the annual renewal being a grudge purchase dominated by price, data inflows from the IoT will allow insurers to position themselves as trusted partner of the policyholders, providing data-driven insights to better manage risk, identify unmet needs, charge by the minute while on-cover and work hand-in-hand with policyholders to improve quality of life.

expect the majority of motor insurance to be dynamically

priced within five years77%

Data flows from sensors embedded in vehicles, household appliances, buildings and personal fitness trackers will allow insurers to finely calibrate their risk exposure and offer dynamic pricing based on actual customer behavior. For an industry that has been slow to capitalize on the digital revolution, creating openings for tech-savvy P2P insurers to carve out market share, the compelling bottom-line benefits of improved underwriting and reduced claims costs are expected to spur rapid investment in IoT initiatives. Our survey shows huge appetite to use M2M data to overhaul pricing: more than half expect the majority of insurance policies in Household and Health lines to be dynamically priced within five years, rising to 77 per cent for Motor carriers. Motor’s head start is a reflection of its early adoption of telematics. A number of

carriers already have innovative telematics offers, which are growing in popularity with drivers as a means to reduce costly premiums or reduce costs of running a car: telematics-driven Discovery Insurance in South Africa provides fuel voucher rewards to customers based on data about their driving.

How soon do you expect the majority of insurance policies to be dynamically priced based on data from connected devices?



Health insurers are also catching on to the benefits of using data from fitness trackers to reward policyholders for healthy lifestyle choices. South African health insurer Vitality is already providing perks to customers who use the health app Move.

believe most insurers will regularly provide personalized

risk information to their customers by 2020

80%

Yet the success of these initiatives goes beyond data-for-discounts. The data from fitness trackers, telematics and other IoT devices presents insurers with an opportunity to engage customers on a regular basis rather than the once-a-year renewal or the stress-point of a claim. They could, for example, provide personalized risk information:

Motor Household Health0

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crime patterns in the customer’s neighborhood, traffic black spots on regular routes or increased health risks from lack of activity. In the US, Ohio-based Progressive uses a telematics offer, Snapshot, that beeps when customers make a hard brake, providing instant feedback to help customers improve their driving. With Snapshot reportedly boosting recruitment and retention rates – with a retention uplift of 40 per cent for those that earn a substantial discount19 – it’s clear that the feedback of data to customers can deliver real wins for insurers on the renewals front-line. Our respondents certainly see this as an attractive model to engage customers: 80 per cent of our respondents believe most insurers will regularly provide personalized risk information to their customers by 2020.

agree that within five years, pre-emptive risk management

will become core to the insurance value proposition

80%

By sharing the insights gleaned from a customer’s day-to-day behaviors, insurers will be able to “nudge” customers towards behaviors that reduce their daily risks, adding real value to the insurer-insured relationship. Insurers would be able to inform drivers, for example, that their favored route to work has black ice and recommend safer alternatives, inform a driver when it is time for an oil change, or use data from a fitness tracker to advise a diabetic to test their blood sugar. By embedding themselves in the policyholder’s life through valued interactions and insight, insurers will be able to disrupt the cycle of churn that has so undermined the profitability of many lines. Our respondents clearly see data-sharing as a key to building a sustainable insurance model: eight out of ten agree that within five years, pre-emptive risk management, rather than just providing compensation, will become core to the insurance value proposition.

Financial Services and the Internet of Things: beyond payments

It is not just insurers that will have the potential to re-imagine the relationship with the customer in the IoT age. Bankers, too, will be able to use the tide of new customer data to better understand their customers, offer personalized financial advice: a holistic view of customer spending would, for example, allow banks to provide highly relevant financial advice based on real understanding of a customer’s spending habits.

Location data has the potential to reduce fraud by enabling banks to use data from multiple points to authenticate transactions or automate time-consuming paperwork: flagging location data when viewing properties, for example, could trigger autofill data into a mortgage application or trigger a claim at the site of a road accident. Beacons in bank branches could help improve the branch experience for customers, ensuring more timely assistance and a seamless flow through the premises, while analyzing customer propensity to use self-service kiosks and ATMs. IoT data could also be used to better understand collateral and manage lending risks: data from in-car telematics could be used to fine-tune the terms of a car loan while readings from fitness trackers might expose when customers are engaged in activities that are detrimental to their financial health, be it gambling or drug taking.

There will need to be clear privacy policies and opt-ins for organizations to access the customer’s day-to-day lives: products and practices must be designed with customers’ best interests at heart, and data collection must always be transparent and systems secure. Get this right, and IoT-enabled financial services organizations will be able to take the customer relationship to the next level.

19. Progressive CEO Glenn Renwick, November 2013

- 18


Increased data inflows from IoT could transform the relationship between financial services providers and their customers. Yet it is not the volume of data that counts: it is the ability to use this data in real time to make better business decisions now and action customer experience improvements now to make every moment in the customer journey count. When it comes to the IoT, the operational focus for banks and insurers should be adding value through real-time analytics and decisioning of the data they already have – which is already too vast for most organizations to make sense of – before they seek to hoover up more data from the ever-expanding data universe.

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Chapter Three

The Future of Personalization

We are Generation Selfie and, encouraged by our experiences with digital leaders Amazon and Netflix, we increasingly expect the banks and insurers we interact with to have operating models in place that recognize us as individuals and personalize our unique customer journey accordingly.

Yet too many organizations still rely on blunt customer segmentation tools, based on income, age and postcode, which fail to recognize the diversity of preferences and behaviors of their customers. Too often interactions with financial services involve customers having to repeat the same information and organizations failing to provide a one-stop service across different products or to understand a customer’s history. These disjointed experiences not only leave customers frustrated by poor service but also expose how little they are understood or valued as an individual by their financial services provider. Little wonder start-ups can gain traction by treating customers as valued partners: personalized marketing and the use of crowdsourcing for product ideation ensure customers feel a valued part of the experience rather than just another number.

Customize to survive

Insurers have been trapped in a price-driven war for market share: with some markets already teetering on the margins of profitability, there is nowhere left to go. A sustainable model for the future must seek out higher margins and capitalize on this one-off opportunity to shift from an annual grudge purchase towards a valued and long-term relationship.

Banks face similar pressures as new entrants continue to eat away at core business, from payments to loans, unbundling traditional banking value chains. To retain customers in the face of this threat, incumbents need to position themselves as life-long partners able to offer personal and valued insight to help customers navigate their increasingly complex financial lives.

It is not just about retaining the customers you already have: effective personalization can also deliver top-line growth. When Dutch health insurer Agis deployed real-time website personalization to improve the relevance of content for each visitor it achieved a 24 per cent uplift in conversion. This model is now being used to improve telephone sales by dynamically offering a different phone number to connect customers to the most appropriate call agent their individual needs, with existing customers presented with a different phone number, answering the customer desire to be recognized by the corporations they are already invested in.

One third of our survey respondents expect their organization to offer full

personalization within two years and three-quarters within five years...but 24 per cent

have no plans to offer this

Financial services executives are clear they cannot ignore customer demand for personalization: one third of our survey respondents expect their organization to offer full personalization within two years and three-quarters within five years. Worryingly, however, just under one quarter (24 per cent) have no plans to offer full personalization:

The Internet brings the world to our fingertips and makes us kings of all we survey: we curate our own news feeds that reflect our own interests and prejudices, our cameras are turned not on the world but ourselves, we broadcast the minutiae of our daily lives and log our steps, our heartbeats, our sleep.

- 20

this resistance could prove damaging as customers flock to competitors offering precision calibrated “customer of one” experiences.

When do you expect your organization to have moved beyond customer segmentation, into the following?

Full personalization Prediction of individual requirements/behavior


Within 5 years

We have no plans to achieve this at present

The data inflows required to deliver this level of customization will transform all interactions, enabling organizations to predict individual requirements and behaviors so that each touch point anticipates next steps to create a flawless end-to-end service: 40 per cent of our respondents expect to predict individual requirements within two years, with 83 per cent expecting to achieve this within five years. Again, it seems the CX gap between those that can anticipate a customer’s needs and the 17 per cent that have no plans to achieve this will be telling in the years between now and 2020.

Up close and personal with customers

expect to be using data from wearable devices in just two years, rising to 68% within

five years38%

Building this highly detailed picture of the customer, and just as importantly acting on that data in real-time, will require access to data from the devices customers have with them the most:. Wearable devices that are with the customer always and everywhere are expected to show the most rapid take-off in terms of customer profiling: 38 per cent expect to be using data from wearable devices in just two years, up from just 5 per cent now and rising to 68 per cent within five years.

Meanwhile, given our love affair with our cars, the connected car is expected to become a data juggernaut in the years to come, providing insight not only into our movements but also our attitudes to risk, through our driving behaviors, and also our preferences, through the music we download, the shops we visit and the on-the-go payments we make. Inevitably given the pace of the renewal of cars already on the road, it will take longer for financial services companies to access data from connected cars: 22 per cent expect to use data from connected cars to profile customers in the next five years, rising to 59 per cent in five years. Insurers have a clear lead over banks here: 21 per cent are already using data from connected cars and 44 per cent will be in two years’ time, whereas none of our surveyed banks are currently using this data and only 11.5 per cent will be two years out.

Smart hubs, still an emerging home technology, will also take time to go mainstream: one in five of our respondents expect to use data from smart home hubs in the next two years. This quickly accelerates, however, as adoption of the technology increases, particularly as Millennials set up home: this digitally-savvy generation is twice as likely as the total population to install a smart home product20: six out of ten of our respondents expect to use data from smart home hubs five years out. Again, insurers take the lead here, seeing clear synergies between data flows from smart home hubs and connected white goods and their core business of assessing and pricing risk.

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20. The NPD Group Connected Intelligence Home Automation Advisory Service, June 2015, reported that one in four Millennials has already installed at least one such device and 41 per cent already aware of and interested in owning smart home products

21 -

When do you expect your organization will use data from the following sources to build a profile of its customers?

We already do this Within 1 year

Within 2 years Within 5 years

Within 10 years Never

Data road blocks

Legacy systems are a significant barrier...

say a lack of single customer view prevents a high level of

personalization85%

Personalization may be on the agenda but our survey finds organizations are struggling to make this a reality. Legacy systems are a significant issue for incumbents, with 85 per cent citing a lack of single customer view as an obstacle to achieving a high level of personalization. Achieving a holistic view of the customer has long been a challenge for financial services organizations, with customer data held in disparate product and departmental silos, blinkering their view of the customer and creating disjointed customer experiences. One survey of insurance executives found that organizations have been deterred from building the long-elusive single view of the customer because of the scale of the legacy challenge: 71 per cent cited the high cost of technology solutions,

61 per cent cited the scale and complexity of the challenge and almost a quarter cited previous failed projects as a reason for slow progress21. It is clear, however, that with agile digital new entrants snapping at their heels, time is running out for financial services organizations, and resolving the long-running saga of legacy systems must now be a priority.

struggle with the availability of sufficiently rich customer data87%

Our respondents also cited the difficulty of processing very large data sets (cited by 84 per cent) as an obstacle to personalization. Certainly the torrent of data now flowing through the modern enterprise is testing all businesses22 and the acceleration of M2M data as the IoT is brought to life will only compound this challenge. And it is not just the processing of large data sets that is thwarting personalization: 85 per cent of our respondents are also struggling to find sufficiently powerful analytical tools.

In our survey, the top obstacle to personalization was the availability of sufficiently rich customer data, cited by 87 per cent of respondents. Organizations may be struggling to crunch through existing data inflows but they are clear that additional data sources will be required to deliver finely calibrated personalization. Data flows from the companion devices that define 21st century life, be it the connected car or app data from the smartphone that never leaves our side23, will be key to building the detailed view that enables a “customer of one” service model.

Privacy, trust and transparency

Customers may want personalized service but they are increasingly aware that the data flows that enable personalization carry both clear value

Wearable Devices

Smart home hubs

Connected Cars

Connected white goods

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21. Customer-Centric Differentiation in Insurance: Meeting the Data Challenge, Visionware, September 201522. IDG Enterprise’s 2014 Big Data survey reported that 65 per cent of respondents felt occasionally overwhelmed by incoming data, 53 per cent

per cent reported that the data influx had delayed important business decisions and 42 per cent said business had been either occasionally or frequently lost due to an inability to quickly find sought-after information

23. 87 per cent say of Millennials say their smartphone never leaves their side, day or night. Research by Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, Internet Trends 2015

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and, following a number of high profile security breaches, risks. Indeed, not only are customers increasingly prepared to put a price tag on their value of their personal data24 but they are growing warier about which organizations they trust to handle and store their data: a survey from the Economist Intelligence Unit found 71 per cent of people in the UK lack confidence in the way companies collect, use, handle and share their data.

And while the IoT makes it possible for organizations to stalk customers through the digital and physical worlds, it is clear there are limits to how much personalization customers will tolerate. One survey of in-store interactions found there’s a clear boundary at which point personalization strays from being helpful to unwelcome: “creepy” personalization included facial recognition that enables targeted advertising (73 per cent), salesperson greeting you by name based on mobile trigger (74 per cent) and facial recognition that identifies your spending habits to salesperson (75 per cent)25. While this research focused on retail interactions, banks intending to use facial recognition to personalize branch experience, might want to take note.

Customers, of course, are adjusting to this new data ecosphere: while facial recognition may be “creepy” now, in time it may be welcome as a way to validate secure transactions. This adjustment will be helped if organizations are consistently clear and transparent about their data intentions. Building trust through transparency, empowering

the customers through opt-ins and investing in robust encryption and security will be key to accessing the data bounty generated by the IoT. Here banks do have an advantage: a survey by Unisys in 2014 found consumers have more trust in banks to look after their personal data than telcos, utilities, supermarkets and governments.

believe personal data stores will be commonplace within

five years79%

Customers are not passive in this data trade and are being increasingly proactive to understand, protect and monetize their personal data. This trend is evidenced by the growth in personal data stores (PDS), an online service that enables an individual to store, manage and release their personal data in a highly secure and structured way. Our survey indicates that PDS will be commonplace within five years: while only nine per cent of our respondents as individuals currently use a PDS, they expect this to increase rapidly, to 45 per cent within two years and 79 per cent within five years. Banks and insurance companies must be ready to respond to the data-empowered customer, both with a strategy to incentivize customers to provide access to data, leveraging their trusted reputation, and operationally with systems that interact seamlessly and securely with the customer’s PDS.


Legacy systems continue to thwart efforts to transform the customer experience. Organizations must embrace a rules-based CRM system to buffer the customer from this toxic tangle, shifting the data to the front office where it can be put to use delivering a seamless and personalized customer experience based on a holistic view of the customer.

24. A survey from Symantec, State of Privacy Report, February 2015, found that 8 per cent of consumers now value their information at over €10,000 25. Instore Personalization: creepy or cool? Survey by RichRelevance, April 201526. Gartner, June 2015

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Chapter Four

The Future of Customer Service

This year the advisory firm identified self-service as one of the top three CX priorities for organizations26 as consumers increasingly seek out the convenience of DIY, be it making banking deposits or initiating an insurance claim. Customers are certainly keen on the DIY approach, as their extreme expectations are ever harder for organizations to fulfil: 82 per cent of companies agree that their customers are harder to please than three years ago, 60 per cent say it is difficult to please them and 42 per cent say customers use social media to shame their company into doing what they want. Customers themselves admit to diva-ish tactics: when seeking help online, for example, 66 per cent expect a same-day response and 43 per cent want a response within an hour or less while the much maligned call center is for a majority of customers a channel of last resort27. Research shows that nearly three out of four consumers prefer to solve their customer service issues on their own, and almost two thirds feel good about themselves and the company they are doing business with when they resolve a problem without talking to customer service28. Millennials are particularly keen on self-service options, making the DIY shift essential to win business from this tech-savvy self-reliant generation. Even Millennials, however, say they prefer the personal touch when it comes to more sophisticated financial transactions, such as investments and pensions. By offering a self-service route for low value transactions and routine tasks, organizations will then be able to spend more time serving those who still require personal attention, be it to handle more complex issues or to meet an individual’s preference for human interaction.

can meet a majority of customer requirements

through automation38%

Yet our research shows financial services organizations fall far short of offering a fully-automated self-service model: just 38 per cent can meet a majority of customer requirements through automation. This means six out of ten organizations are failing to deliver a service that not only keeps customers happy but that also lowers the cost to serve. Banks are ahead on self-service, with 45 per cent able to currently meet the majority of customer requirements through automation compared to 22 per cent of insurers. Given that automation offers a clear way to speed up routine tasks, strip out costs and please customers, insurers cannot afford to fall behind on the DIY revolution.

Proportion of customer requirements that can currently be met by self-service

All

The majority

A significant minority

A tiny minority

None

In the future, customer service will increasingly mean self-service. Back in 2011 Gartner predicted that by the end of this decade 85 per cent of customer relationships would be managed without human intervention.

27. Lithium Technologies, October 201428. Survey by Aspect Software, April 201529. The State of Unassisted Support, 2014, Technology Services Industry Association

- 24

One study of tech support businesses in the US found that the cost of resolving a customer service incident via phone now averages US$510; email incidents, with their back-and-forth conversations to gather additional data stretching out resolution, average nearly US$700. Real-time chat interactions, however, average US$150 but the real win is web self-service, at just US$4. This is a win:win, because the same study found that most customers prefer this low cost self-service channel when seeking support for a product problem (65 per cent) compared to phone (just 11 per cent) or social media (five per cent)29.

say legacy systems are the main constraint on meeting customer demand for full

self-service

94%

Financial services organizations that are serious about customer experience must remedy this self-service gap. Our respondents are clear about the main obstacle, with 94 per cent identifying legacy systems as the main constraint on meeting customer demand for full self-service. A key challenge is that these out-dated and siloed systems cannot use customer data in real-time, which means routine tasks are derailed because of incomplete or out-of-date data: just nine per cent of our respondents say their organization can use all the data it holds on the customer in real time during every customer interaction. This is expected to rapidly change as organizations scrabble to keep pace with customer self-service requirements: 46 per cent expect to be able to use all customer data in real time within two years and 86 per cent within five years. Addressing this, given the scale of the legacy system challenge, will mean organizations must move business logic from the tangle of back-office legacy systems to a user-friendly digital front-office.

The DIY Toolkit

While full self-service may lie five years or more off for the majority of our cohort, in the interim we find financial services companies are deploying a range of services and tools to help guide customers through online interactions: static help pages (used by 81 per cent), online chat (80 per cent), co-browsing (79 per cent), avatars (58 per cent) and help from the contact center (56 per cent).

When asked which was the most used channel by customers who found themselves stuck or confused during an online interaction, the top answer was help from a contact center (44 per cent): it would seem that customers still seek the safety net of human interaction when self-service options stumble, making it imperative that organizations have seamless backup from the contact center. The next most used backup by customers was avatars (42 per cent), which indicates that customers have no particular preference whether the support is human or virtual as long as their query is handled seriously, speedily and satisfactorily. Nordic insurance company Alka, for example, uses live chat to support customers through the online process, enabling agents to handle multiple enquiries at once while also growing the top line, as it has proved popular as an independent sales channel. The insurer receives 3,000 and 5,000 customer enquiries per month via the live chat format, a sign of its popularity with customers.

agree that increased use of computer-generated

recommendations in contact centers would reduce errors

and ultimately improve customer outcomes...

85%

An important tool in the self-service toolkit is the use of computer-generated recommendations, whether delivered by an avatar or a contact

30. Blue Prism case study

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center agent during live chat: indeed, 85 per cent of our respondents agree that increased use of computer-generated recommendations in contact centers would reduce errors and ultimately improve customer outcomes.

...but just one -in- five make extensive use of computer-generated recommendations to

guide contact center staff

Yet this remains an aspiration: just one in five make extensive use of computer-generated recommendations to guide contact center staff and only 14 per cent to directly guide customers. There are signs of change, with 43 per cent and 48 per cent conducting pilots or making minor use of computer-generated recommendations for contact center staff or direct to customers respectively. However, that still leaves more than a third engaging in customer interactions without data-driven insights to speed and smooth the customer experience. Despite the compelling business case to deploy computer-generated recommendations to improve CX, uptake remains sluggish. This suggests organizations have not yet appreciated the urgency of the competitive threat, given customer appetite for the kind of smart solutions pioneered by innovation leaders.

agree the widespread use of virtual assistants such as Siri on the iPhone means

customers are more willing to engage with automated

assistance and advice

76%

How soon do you expect your organization to make extensive use of computer-generated recommendations for guiding contact center staff?



Indeed, customers are fast outstripping financial services providers in their willingness to embrace new CX models and are quickly becoming accustomed to interacting with automated and virtual assistants: 76 per cent of our respondents agree the widespread use of virtual assistants such as Siri on the iPhone means customers are more willing to engage with automated assistance and advice. Companies serious about staying relevant will need to keep pace with customers, who consistently show an appetite to adopt and adapt to innovation: of those respondents not yet making extensive use of computer-generated recommendations for contact center staff and customers, eight out of ten plan to achieve this within five years. The one in five who expect this to take ten years or more could find the gap between customer expectations and service reality becomes too wide to bridge.

Robots: the new face of banking?

This gap is already looming. The application of robotic automation, high powered analytics and computer-learning can significantly improve the customer experience while driving out costs. Robot Process Automation eliminates human error, reduces costs and increases the speed of routine processes: one major global bank

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automated a wide range of processes, including Fraudulent Account Closure, Loan Application Opening and Right Of Set Off, eliminating over 120 Full Time Equivalent (FTE) positions and reducing its bad debt provision by £175 million per annum30. In insurance the cost of miscoding on claims adds up to millions per year, not even counting client dismay at this “moment of truth”; yet insurers could achieve 80% first-pass accuracy through auto-adjudication31. Given that a software robot would cost around one ninth of an FTE person working in the UK or US, or a third of the cost of an FTE working offshore in India, the cost savings are likely to prove compelling. Indeed, a recent slew of predictions from Gartner, forecast that by 2018, 20 per cent of business content will be authored by machines, autonomous software agents outside of human control will participate in five per cent of all economic transactions and more than 3 million workers globally will be supervised by a “robo-boss.”

Even tasks long the preserve of highly paid investment managers can be “roboticized”. Following in the digital footsteps of investment disruptors Betterment LLC and Wealthfront Inc, US banking giant Bank of America has developed a robo-adviser platform for Merrill Edge, its online trading hub, which will use algorithms and artificial intelligence to provide investment advice to clients, specifically targeting Millennials. Managed through an app, the robo-advisers suggest investments and regularly rebalance the portfolio and realize losses for the sake of tax efficiency. According to a study by A.T. Kearney, robots could be managing assets worth US$2.2 trillion by 2020, about 5.6 per cent of US investment assets, up from just 0.5 per cent today.

Almost three quarters of our respondents agree that in the future

customers will interact with a human-like avatar until they reach the point of needing

to speak to a real person.

The typical banking customer or insurance policyholder, of course, is unaware that much of their business is being handled by software robots. This is set to change as humanoid robots start to join the economy: almost three quarters of our respondents agree that in the branch of the future customers will interact with a human-like avatar until they reach the point of needing to speak to a real person.

“How likely is it that, in the branch of the future, customers will interact with a human-like avatar until they reach the point of needing to speak to a real person?”

Very likely Likely

Fairly likely Not likely

This future may not be too far ahead: already Japan’s biggest bank is trialling humanoid robot employees. The robot, Nao, is programmed to speak 19 languages and, through a camera on his forehead, analyzes customers’ emotions from

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31. The Robot & I: how new and digital technologies are making smart people smarter, Cognizant white paper, 201532. Blythe Masters, CEO of Digital Asset Holdings

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their facial expressions and tone of voice. The robot will greet customers in one or two branches of Mitsubishi UFJ Financial Group, quickly assessing their language needs, asking which services they need and, using stored insight into more than 5.5 million customers and over 100 different products, can then route the customer to the appropriate staff member based on past experience, products utilized or current mobile activity. This is not just a gimmick: Nao uses each interaction to learn a customer’s preferences and personality, enabling it to increase the accuracy of each subsequent interaction. For customers of Mitsubishi UFJ Financial Group, the future is already here.

CASE STUDYMars National Bank

Mars National Bank, a community bank in Pennsylvania, has opened what it calls the “Branch of the Future”, offering a highly automated banking experience featuring biometric security. It still employs real human beings to greet customers as they walk in before directing them to the highly automated service area. There, customers can engage with transaction “pods,” use meeting rooms, and even access safety deposit boxes via biometric authentication. The bank’s state of the art branch, however, is an extension of an increasingly digital offering: the myMNB Mobile banking app includes account management, bill payment, “Popmoney” (a person-to-person direct payment service) and mobile deposit. It’s a seamless blend of bricks, clicks and biometrics.


Customer appetite for innovation means they are increasingly willing to embrace web-based self-service and avatar interaction. Financial services organizations must keep pace with their customers or risk losing market share to competitors willing to invest in computer-guided service and automation to smooth the customer journey. A modern CRM system facilitates digital self-service but banks and insurers must also seek out solutions that are agile and able to flex on a monthly, if not weekly, basis in order to evolve hand in hand with customers’ changing needs.

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Chapter Five

Is Blockchain the Next Big Disruption?

Certainly the surge of fintech scrums, growing VC investment, increased press attention and blockchain conferences where suits now outnumber hoodies suggests there is growing interest in a technology that has the potential to be a game-changer for all aspects of financial services, from current accounts, clearing and settlement to insurance claims. One blockchain evangelist has described the technology as “analogous to email for money”32.

Blockchain, a distributed public ledger which can securely record any information and the ownership of any asset, gained notoriety as the platform for the cryptocurrency Bitcoin – perhaps not the most promising start for a technology that is now being touted as the savior of the global banking system. Indeed, financial institutions were initially wary of blockchain: not just because of the murky Silk Road and Mt Gox scandals but because the technology appeared to have the potential to circumvent traditional banks altogether.

On a blockchain (where the block is a string of code), the information is transparently held in a shared database, without a single body acting as a middleman: this creates opportunities to strip out massive costs by cutting out inefficient intermediaries while executing trades in seconds. Santander InnoVentures, the Spanish bank’s fintech investment fund, estimates blockchain could save lenders up to US$20 billion annually in settlement, regulatory and cross-border payment costs33.

It is not just costs that will be transformed. Because the ledger is shared between many different parties it can only be updated by consensus of a majority of the participants in the system and, once entered, information can

never be erased: this makes it tamper-proof and ensures a verifiable chronological record of every transaction made. This is the back-end overhaul that has so long eluded the financial services industry, allowing payment speed and security to be provided without the need for cumbersome banking IT systems.

“Smart contracts” could also be embedded within blockchain, as videos can be embedded in emails, leading to automated pay-outs on contracts within the financial services value chain. Indeed, almost any intangible document or asset can be expressed in code, which can then be programmed into a distributed ledger: loyalty points, air miles, health records, votes. Even physical assets, such as artworks or diamonds, could have their ownership trails verified on blockchain to prevent forgery and ensure authentication of source.

Nine out of ten agree that blockchain will disrupt all areas of the financial chain

There are no aspects of the financial services chain that will not be impacted by widespread use of blockchain, although front-end retail will be less affected than back-end clearing and settlement area. While nine out of ten of our respondents agree that blockchain will disrupt all areas of the financial chain, including current accounts, it is cards & payments and clearing & settlement that will bear the brunt of the upheaval: over half our respondents said these areas will feel significant disruption from blockchain technology.

The jury is still out on whether blockchain is the savior of a financial services industry under pressure from digital disruption, eroding margins, increasingly audacious cyber-attacks and ongoing regulatory scrutiny, or just another technological false dawn.

33. Santander InnoVentures, June 201534. Bitcoin Venture Capital, published by CoinDesk, June 2015

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The blockchain dash

For now, financial institutions are still scrambling to understand the implications of blockchain and how to harness its power. There has been a splurge of investment in blockchain start-ups and fintech joint ventures: venture capitalists ploughed almost US$400 million into dozens of digital currency start-ups in the first six months of 2015, a fourfold jump from all of 2013 – and that does not count investments kept quiet for stealth projects34.

Bitcoin’s open source blockchain is decentralized and open to anyone but many in banking are wary of this: this is an industry used to guarding its secrets closely and which remains mindful of regulatory oversight. As a result, a number of banks have developed proprietary in-house models, such as Citigroup’s Citicoin, a digital technology it is testing in the bank’s laboratory. Commonwealth Bank of Australia has teamed up with open source software provider Ripple to build a blockchain system for payments between its subsidiaries. Others, such as JPMorgan, UBS and Barclays, are backing start-up R3 CEV, which is setting up an invitation-only private blockchain. Digital Asset Holdings, meanwhile, is creating an off-the-shelf private blockchain product.

have never heard of blockchain35%

Despite the hype, this is still an emergent technology: 42 per cent of our respondents claim to understand blockchain but 23 per cent admit they do not and 35 per cent have never even heard of it. What’s more, many are in the dark as to whether their organizations are on top of this potential game-changer: respondents confessed they did not know if their organizations were undertaking research (46 per cent), had formed a working group (69 per cent), formulated a strategy

(83 per cent), were collaborating (80 per cent) or had dedicated teams working on blockchain (84 per cent). This lack of awareness reveals that blockchain is still at the “wow” rather than a “what and when” phase of the innovation life cycle.

believe that blockchain will prove to be the most significant technology

development to affect financial services since the Internet

60%

Among those of our respondents who said they had at least a general understanding of blockchain, 60 per cent believe it will prove to be the most significant technology development to affect financial services since the Internet, albeit that still leaves a third who do not see it as a rival to the revolution unleashed by Tim Berners-Lee’s 1991 invention of the World Wide Web. This is an early-stage innovation, however, and it is likely that as blockchain initiatives emerge from proof of concept, the disruptive power of the technology will become more evident.

There are many challenges to overcome first. These include restricted scalability – Bitcoin’s blockchain handles seven transactions per second compared to VisaNet’s 47,000 – as well as issues of access and standardization, given the fragmentation of effort and potential for friction between public and private blockchain initiatives35. Innovators are optimistic these hurdles will be overcome in the coming decade: one survey found that almost one in five believe blockchain will have the greatest impact on the financial services space in the next three-to-five years, and almost nine per cent believe blockchain will be the “new normal” across the financial spectrum by 203036.

Just 17% have a strategy for blockchain and only 16% have a dedicated team

working on blockchain

35. Goldman Sachs, Emerging Theme Radar research note, December 201536. Capital One survey of innovators at Money 20/20, October 2015

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Our respondents have some distance to travel before blockchain becomes “normal” in their organizations: just 17 per cent say their organization has a strategy for blockchain and only 16 per cent have a dedicated team working on blockchain. In the wake of these pioneers, however, there are some fast followers, with 31 per cent forming working groups and 20 per cent partnering with a fintech specialist, while a solid group at least have the technology on their radar, with 54 per cent saying their organization is undertaking research into the potential impact of blockchain.

Blockchain wallets

One in five expect it to be mainstream practice for consumers to hold most of their financial assets in a blockchain wallet within

just five years...

For retail banks the big threat could come from blockchain wallets, where consumers could hold most of their financial assets on the blockchain, eliminating the need for third parties, to enable secure peer-to-peer transactions. Millennials have already shown a clear appetite to embrace P2P models, such as Venmo, so it is not too much of a stretch to see consumers using blockchain to manage their financial affairs in the future. One in five (22 per cent of our respondents) expect it to be mainstream practice for consumers to hold most of their financial assets in a blockchain wallet within five years, rising to 55 per cent in ten years and 71 per cent in 15 years.

think the combination of blockchain wallets and

P2P lending could herald the end of banking as we know it

45%

The jury is still out on how this will impact incumbent banks: 45 per cent of our respondents believe the combination of blockchain wallets and peer-to-peer lending could herald the end of banking as we know it. That 55 per cent disagree with this apocalyptic vision suggests there’s cautious optimism about the industry’s chances in a blockchain-enabled world. How the current scramble to investigate blockchain initiatives will tip this balance is a question that will be answered in years to come.

How soon will the following become mainstream practice?

Within 1 year Within 2 years Within 5 year

Within 10 years Within 15 years

Within 20 year Never

Consumers holding most of their

financial assets in a blockchain wallet

Certain types of insurance claims

being settled using IoT data, blockchain

and smart contracts

Consumers holding their personal data, including their ID,

in a blockchain

0

10

20

30

5

15

25

35

40

31 -

Insurance claims: a new paradigm

12% expect the settlement of insurance claims using IoT data, blockchain and smart contracts to be mainstream practice within

two years...

74% expect it to be mainstream by 2025

Claims have long been a difficult issue for insurers. It is the costliest part of insurance, the most vulnerable to fraud and also the “moment of truth” when insurers have an opportunity to delight — or disappoint — in a largely undifferentiated marketplace. Blockchain has the potential to transform the claims process: drawing on data from IoT to validate a claim – evidence rain damage to a crop, for example – could then auto-trigger the filing of a claim, which is then promptly settled via a smart contract on the blockchain. Given the insurance industry’s reputation for conservatism, it is interesting to note that 12 per cent of our respondents expect the settlement of insurance claims using IoT data, blockchain and smart contracts to be mainstream practice within two years, and from there rapid take-off is predicted: 47 per cent expect it to be mainstream within five years, 74 per cent within ten years and 85 per cent by 2025.

This vision of a smart, automated future is already at proof-of-concept stage. IBM is working with Samsung on ADEPT, (Autonomous Decentralized Peer-to-Peer Telemetry), which uses blockchain to build a distributed network of devices. This is IoT 2.0, building a ledger of existence for billions of devices that would autonomously broadcast transactions with ADEPT serving as a low cost bridge between many devices to create intelligent semi-autonomous things. A washing machine, for example, could manage its own consumables supply using smart contracts to issue commands to a retailer to order new supplies of detergent, perform self-service and maintenance, and

even negotiate with other devices, both in the home and outside, to optimize its environment, including power bartering. Information that contracts have been issued, and fulfilled, would be broadcast to the smartphone of the householder. Blockchain and IoT combined really are bringing the future forward. While this massively reduces costs and fraud for insurers, it does risk the customer relationship shifting to manufacturers of connected goods, who could embed warranties and insurance as smart contracts within their appliances: insurance companies need to have strategies to handle these still-evolving opportunities and threats.

Blockchain: your personal data store

The tamper-proof nature of the blockchain has clear advantages to an industry under siege from cyber-fraud, hackers and organized crime. Consumers are also likely to welcome a technology that would no longer leave their personal data sitting on centralized servers, vulnerable to attack or theft, but instead keep it on a blockchain and allow temporary release to organizations for specified transactions or periods of time. Forty-two per cent of our respondents believe it will be mainstream for consumers to hold their personal data, including ID, in a blockchain within five years, rising to 73 per cent within ten years.

It is worth pointing out, however, that the features that make blockchains so attractive in terms of security are also likely to give rise to privacy concerns. Blockchains are append-only data stores – data can only be added, not deleted. They are also distributed, being maintained by a peer network across multiple nodes, each of which has a copy of the blockchain and has equal authority to add to it, but data cannot be altered without being detected and rejected by the other nodes in the network. Yet privacy law is still evolving in the digital age: there is now a right to be forgotten, be it related to past insolvency or gender transition, and there are clearly scenarios where data held in

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a blockchain would be contrary to this legal right. Blockchains also create opportunities for people to collaborate on datasets in a peer network: this could be useful for crowdsourcing and peer-to-peer lending models but could create issues when those datasets concern personal data on individuals who may not have consented but find malicious or incorrect data difficult to remove. The implications of blockchain pose major questions not just for financial institutions but for wider society.


Blockchain is an emerging technology that could trigger wholesale disruption, with some pundits warning it could end banking as we know it while others argue it could be the savior of financial services sector. Banks and insurers need to be aware of the risks, and opportunities, presented by blockchain: the earlier these are understood at the highest levels of the business, the sooner organizations will be able to understand the implications, develop strategies to mitigate the risks and harness its power and begin a potentially transformative operational overhaul. It is too early to say whether the claims made for blockchain are hyperbole but one thing is clear: banks and insurers cannot afford to be complacent.

CASE STUDYVisa Europe: innovation in international remittances

Visa Europe’s innovation hub Visa Europe Collab is testing blockchain technology to improve the transfer of money overseas. It is a service that is a vital lifeline for millions of families across the world but one that can be expensive, cumbersome and slow even in the digital age and was seen as ripe for disruption by peer-to-peer payments on the blockchain. Partnering with Epiphyte, a start-up specializing in distributed ledger solutions, Visa Europe Collab is trialling whether blockchain can improve international remittances for both sender and receiver in terms of fees, speed and ease of use. Unlike many financial companies, which are pursuing closed proprietary ledgers, the payments giant is conducting the test project on the live Bitcoin blockchain: because this is open source it means local players can integrate with this and extend the reach of the network. This is seen to be a creative solution to what is called the “last mile” problem, in which much of the cost of remittances is down to the physical kiosks that pay out the hard currency.

This is just the beginning, with Visa Europe Collab investigating other possibilities around cryptocurrencies and blockchain within the payments ecosystem. Clearly, this incumbent is determined to leverage blockchain to improve its services and capabilities rather than lose its head start to P2P disruption.

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Chapter Six

The Innovation Imperative

According to the Global Center for Digital Business Transformation, 40 per cent of today’s leading companies will be displaced from their market position by digital disruption in the next five years37.

Interestingly, this means even current tech giants will find it challenging to remain in the top spot unless they constantly stoke the fires of innovation. Venmo, the hot P2P payment app, for example is owned by one-time payment disruptor PayPal, which is already considered a legacy incumbent that could not have developed Venmo itself: instead it bought the app through its acquisition of Braintree. Similarly, social media giant Facebook is working hard to stay fresh through acquisitions, buying WhatsApp and Instagram.

The challenge that faces all organizations, both incumbents and challengers, is that there is no single technology to which they must adapt but instead a series of disruptions assaulting them almost simultaneously. The most significant disruption in the next five years is believed to be the impact of digitally-savvy new entrants (50 per cent of our respondents said this would unleash significant or massive disruption by 2020), followed by the peer-to-peer model (41 per cent), the Internet of Things (39 per cent) and Blockchain (34 per cent).

Digital competition: disrupt or be disrupted

Digitally-savvy new entrants certainly present a clear and present threat to incumbent banks and insurers. Survey after survey shows consumers,

particularly Millennials, have an appetite to switch to smart digital solutions that offer a frictionless end-to-end experience. In insurance, a Marketforce survey found 92 per cent of insurers expect digitally-enabled players that are new to financial services to become a significant force in insurance within five years, and 55 per cent expect this to happen within two years38. Possible new entrants include an internet search provider, an online retailer or even a social network.

Banks are also feeling the heat of fierce competition: in 2014 a record 29 firms applied for banking licences from the UK financial regulator, the Prudential Regulatory Authority (PRA), sharp contrast to 2010 when Metro Bank was the first new bank to obtain a license in the UK since the 19th Century. As with insurance, banking customers are attracted to smart digital solutions: One survey found one in five customers would bank with PayPal if it offered a current account while studies regularly show Millennials would happily switch to financial services provided by Google, Amazon or Square, that is if they need a bank at all39.

New entrants in lending and payments disaggregate banks from key parts of the value chain The range of digital-only services already encompasses the full value chain:

» Investing services, like the robo-adviser Betterment or RobinHood

» Saving and investing apps, such as Acorns or Moneybox, which invest spare change from everyday purchases

The past decade has seen a relentless cycle of disruption and innovation. The pace of change means all bets are off as disruption and innovation stress-test existing models, with past market dominance no guarantee of success, or even survival, in the future.

37. Global Center for Digital Business Transformation, a Cisco/IDC initiative, June 201538. Future of General Insurance 2015, Marketforce39. The Millennial Disruption Index, Scratch, 2015

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» Credit card alternative, Affirm, which allows customers to obtain a micro-loan at a point of sale instead of using a credit card

» ATM challenger Nimbl, a cash delivery service

» Student loan refinancing service, such as SoFi

» Small business lending: new services from mobile payments companies iZettle in Europe and Square in the US

It is not just that these nimble new entrants provide intuitive frictionless solutions but, as with the social banter of a Venmo exchange, they also manage to make the experience fun and engaging. New entrants seem to be able to strike the right balance between one-click convenience and the warmth of human interaction.

Incumbents need to foster the same customer-obsessed mind set, harnessing the power of digital technology, such as gamification and social media functions, to create experiences that are engaging and rewarding for customers. Spanish bank BBVA has successfully deployed gamification to encourage customers to use its online banking service, with users rewarded with points and badges based on how often they use the online platform. It helps guide customers through the lesser-known functions on the platform, such as electronic tax payment, modification of personal information, banking products and service applications. This encourages customers to share more data with the bank, which can then use the data to launch personalized challenges and rewards. By linking the game with the bank’s sponsorship of the football league, the game has also proven a useful tool for new customer acquisition as existing customers share online quizzes, video games and social media chat with their friends.

Risk averse, innovation afraid

of our respondents said their organization would tolerate such a 50% failure rate on innovation pilot projects...

30%

Replicating not only these experiences but also the crucible of innovation that gives rise to the likes of Venmo is a challenge for incumbents, with their centuries of history, their entrenched corporate cultures and cumbersome legacy systems. Indeed, our survey finds that the appetite for risk in innovation is relatively low: while innovation experts believe companies should accept a 50 per cent failure rate across all innovation pilots in order to fuel a culture of innovation, only 30 per cent of our respondents said their organization would tolerate such a failure rate.

...and more than six out of ten believe their governing board should set the failure

rate for innovation pilots much lower, below 30%

Furthermore, more than six out of ten believe their governing board should set the maximum failure rate for innovation pilots much lower, below 30 per cent. This conservatism is a brake on innovation: in Silicon Valley, the crucible of digital innovation, the mantra is “fail fast, fail often” and some estimates put the start-up failure rate to be 90 per cent. This is clearly beyond the pale for banks and insurers, now walking in the shadow of the 2008 financial crisis and under the scrutiny of regulators. Indeed, this balancing act between innovation and regulatory compliance could well be the defining skill of 21st century financial

35 -

services leaders. This is not just a tight-rope walk for banks and insurers: governments that wish to host best-in-class financial services sectors must ensure that regulatory regimes are carefully calibrated so that they safeguard against the kinds of behaviors that characterized the 2008 crisis while also nurturing and tolerating innovations that will deliver better outcomes for customers.

Would your organization’s governing board find it

acceptable for there to be a 50 per cent failure rate

across all innovation pilots?

What failure rate for innovation pilots do you think your organization’s governing board should

tolerate?

Yes

No

Up to 20%

Up to 30%

Up to 50%

Up to 70%

But are banks and insurers now too cowed by the fear of failure? Analysts at PwC estimate that roughly 80 per cent of financial institutions rely excessively on incremental innovation – marginal improvements that focus on “better, faster, cheaper” or “me too” imitations of their competitors” – rather than focusing on real innovation.

Breakthrough innovation that can really shift the needle on ROI requires an enterprise-wide culture of innovation, with those at senior level tolerating failure, carving out time, resource and budget for innovation and encouraging and supporting new ideas.

agree that “the key to successful value proposition innovation in retail financial services is to think beyond traditional

industry boundaries to identify new ways of meeting consumer

needs”

98%

A number of institutions have recognized their limitations, fostering arm’s-length innovation hubs and “laboratories” to foster innovation, often in partnership with fintech partners, who have a clear mandate to innovate and think “outside the box”. Our respondents are clear that this will be essential: an overwhelming 98 per cent agree that “the key to successful value proposition innovation in retail financial services is to think beyond traditional industry boundaries to identify new ways of meeting consumer needs”.

Already some companies are thinking outside their industry box to deliver true innovation to customers. Insurance company More Than, for example, used a lean start-up approach to develop its innovative pet telematics offer, Waggle Pets, which in return for a monthly fee provides deliveries of healthy pet food, a wearable pet activity tracker, toys, treats and preventative treatments. It partnered with animal charity RSPCA to ensure the treatments and food are healthy, a tie-up that ensures peace of mind for its pet-loving policyholders. Banks are also extending partnerships to improve their relevancy to their customers. In the US, for example, a regional bank offers car financing through a mobile app: when the customer enters information about the model of car, if the bank has a relationship with the dealership, the app displays the price the bank has negotiated with the dealer and determines if the buyer is qualified to receive financing from the bank, providing the customer with a frictionless service and puts the bank at the forefront of this major purchasing decision.

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Challengers have their own challenges

It is not just traditional players that are struggling to innovate. Despite excitement about the launch of so-called challenger banks in the years following the financial crash, their impact has been muted: 86 per cent of our respondents believe that challenger banks in their own country have yet to demonstrate any significant disruptive innovation.

To some extent this is because the “challenger” label is not always accurate: many were spun out of existing banking groups and bequeathed a toxic legacy of a replicate IT system, which is even more of an encumbrance for a smaller bank. Others, even with more agile back office systems, struggle with the reporting and capital requirements of regulatory requirements: as a result, in the UK there are discussions to lighten the regulatory load for smaller banks as the authorities recognize current requirements are undermining competition. Given the barriers still facing this group of banks seven years on from the financial crash, it is little wonder that customers now expect disruption to come from outside the banking sector: nearly half are counting on tech start-ups to overhaul the way banking works40.

Innovate fast

The pace of change is eye-watering. From smart refrigerators, driverless cars, 3D printing and rise of the robots, suddenly the technology of the future is in our homes, on our roads, in our workplaces. Consumer adoption rates continue to compress at startling rates: it took more than 30 years for radio to achieve an adoption rate of 50 per cent; mobile phones took 15 years to reach the same level; social media just 3.5 years. Once industries had years to adjust to technological change: now the disruption is coming in so hard and fast that industries have little chance to fight back: look at Uber’s near knock-out blow in markets where it operates, while just after Google launched its beta app, Google Maps, the GPS device market lost as much as 85 per cent of its market cap.

believe it is very important for their organization to improve the speed with which systems and processes can be created or adapted to underpin new

offerings

80%

Organizations need to find ways to work faster and smarter so they can flex with changing market demands. Product development cycles that could be measured in years now need to scramble to be ready to launch in months. Our respondents clearly recognize the importance of speed and agility to support innovation: 80 per cent believe it is very important for their organization to improve the speed with which systems and processes can be created or adapted to underpin new offerings.

To what extent do legacy systems constrain your organization’s agility in adapting quickly to new technological advances and changes in consumer behavior?

Massively

Significantly

Moderately

Slightly

Not at all

Unsurprisingly, 95 per cent say legacy systems constrain their organization’s agility in adapting quickly to new technological advances and changes in consumer behavior – for 62 per cent this is a significant impediment. Financial services organizations must find ways to free their innovation teams of cumbersome legacy systems so that they can put in place a customer-obsessed operating model, whether this is through simplification of core platforms to support new digital products and services, or an investment in cloud-based solutions to provide scale and agility.

Yet it is worth pointing out some of the issues that constrain incumbent players can also be their

0 20 4010 30 50

40. Cited in PWC report, When the Growing Gets Tough: How Retail Banks Can Thrive in a Disruptive, Mobile, Regulated World

37 -

strengths: they have scale, a key drawback for challengers; they have a head start in managing the complexity and onerous reporting demands of regulatory requirements, and, importantly - they have the capital that fintech start-ups crave to scale-up innovation.

Indeed, it might seem that the best solution to many of the challenges of digital disruption is a marrying of fintech creativity with the customer base scale and trust that incumbents own. This will bring challenges of its own in marrying very different cultures and attitudes – one banking executive said “fintegration” is the holy grail for banks41 - but it does offer a clear route for both parties to drive forward innovation at scale and pace but with a mind to the trusted position of looking after other people’s money and the need to stay compliant.

80% think it likely the financial services leaders of the future will

have a coffee addiction

82% that they are likely to own an Apple Watch

78% expect the male of the species to sport a beard

It is clear our respondents expect this integration of cultures to change the face of banking as techie hipsters collide with suited city bankers: 80 per cent of our respondents think the financial services leaders of the future are likely to have coffee addictions, 82 per cent think they are likely to own an Apple Watch and 78 per cent envisage the male of the species sporting a beard. Some things are not changing however: respondents still think it more likely that the financial services leaders of the future will regularly wear a to suit to work (78 per cent) rather than regularly wear jeans (66 per cent).

Although light-hearted, it is interesting to note that these attitudes show how entrenched conservative thinking is in the financial services sector. It might be useful for them to look to the CEO of blockchain innovator Digital Asset Holding Blythe Masters, Gabrielle Patrick, co-founder of cryptofinance software solution provider Epiphyte or Louise Wilson, co-founder of peer-to-peer investment firm Abundance: not a beard in sight.


It is clear that many in the financial services industry have a low tolerance for risk and innovation; this is natural for organizations that are trusted to look after other people’s hard-earned money and assets and face stiff penalties if they are seen to transgress strict regulatory rules. But it is also a failure of leadership, within both companies and regulatory authorities, as this innate conservatism leaves incumbents vulnerable to competition from digital new entrants that can offer highly innovative solutions that change how customers behave. To find a balance, banks and insurers should engage regulators in early dialogue about their innovation ambitions and then partner with fintech start-ups to realize them: both sides win from these partnerships, with incumbents gaining access to the best new ideas in return for customer insight, capital and scale. Banks and insurers cannot afford to ignore fintechs; if they do not partner with these crucibles of innovation, their competitors will.

41. Andres Wolberg-Stok, Global Head of Emerging Platforms and Services at Citibank, quoted in The Disruption of Banking, a report from the Economist Intelligence Unit, 2015

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Conclusions

Instead, banks and insurers face a perfect storm of fierce competition, changing customer behavior and ongoing regulatory scrutiny. On the horizon, we see successive waves of technological disruption, be it the IoT, extreme personalization, robotics, AI or blockchain.

Organizations must work fast to ready their operations for these changes. With legacy systems increasingly unfit for purpose, serious investment needs to be made in modern CRM with the back office increasingly acting as a data repository. A sophisticated front office interface needs to be able to flex and evolve in partnership with customers, anticipating their needs and delivering a flawless customer experience – whether the customer interacts via digital self-service on their smartphone, makes payments through a fitband or smart TV or even takes advice from a branch-based avatar.

Some pioneers are already piloting the financial services models of the future – and customers, especially Millennials, like them. As customer adoption of P2P models, crowdfunding and wearable payments takes off, many banks and insurers risk looking increasingly irrelevant and will lose market share to those organizations that have kept pace with customers. Our research shows too many organizations are falling behind; they can see where the trends are going but are failing to make the necessary operational changes quickly enough.

Our recommendation could not be clearer: find smart fixes to the legacy issues that impede the customer experience and build agility into your solutions so that your operations are customer obsessive and ready for the future, whatever it may bring.

It may have weathered the financial crash, but the retail financial services sector has had no respite.

iPhone, Siri and Apple Watch are registered trademarks of Apple Inc. Other names used herein may be trademarks of their respective owners.

© Cognizant© Marketforce Business Media Ltd

© Pegasystems Inc

January 2016Research devised and conducted by Marketforce

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