The DNA of a digital bank

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By Abhijit Singh, Technology Thought Leader

What is a Digital Bank? There is an often-confused notion of what really constitutes a Digital Bank – Is it an addition of mobile apps and tablets? Is it creating a paperless bank? Is it about digitalisation of processes and products?

Let us look at some of the core characteristics of a digital bank:

#1 Ability to offer superior customer service at a lower cost to serve at every touch point: For example, the bank must be able to offer the customer the choice of channel to interact – it could be the mobile app, a kiosk, an ATM, a website or chatbot with nearly the same level of customer service.

#2 Ability to retain and update customer information at each access point: It is normally frustrating for a customer to keep on repeating the same customer complaint on different channels. A digital bank must have the ability to aggregate information from different access points (say social media) and pass on the information to another access point seamlessly, so that there is no slip in communication. At the same time, if a customer is searching on your website for a specific service, and if the same customer calls the bank up, the bank must be able to proactively service him and delight him with updated information on the service required.

# 3 Ability to scale up: Traditional banks need a lot of time to expand – as it involves setting up physical branches which have their own set of challenges. Digital banks suffer from no such constraints and can expand and scale quickly by leveraging the power of emerging technologies.

# 4 Ability to hyperpersonalize services: Armed with complete data about the customer, a digital bank can truly leverage data to build a 360 degree view of the customer. This can help the digital bank to offer services that are truly relevant for a customer depending on the profile. For example, a bank can leverage geo-locational data to provide real-time offers to customers.

# 5 Seamless Self-service: Digital banks pride on their ability to provide a superior user interface, which allows self-service and enhances the ability to self-enroll. This not only reduces customer queries but also gives banks the ability to scale up quickly at significantly lesser cost than the traditional channels. It also gives banks access to regions that cannot be reached through traditional banking channels.

# A digital mindset: The bank must see digital as their culture, and every business process must be re-engineered with the objective to use the digital medium to improve customer experience and improve efficiencies.

# Open Banking: All services from third party service providers must be easily pluggable and the bank must have the ability to offer or expose its core banking platform to independent app developers to build innovative apps.

– The author is an experienced COO and digital transformation leader in Financial Services

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