Having spent a lot of time attending to retail customers, banks are now trying to digitally transform their wealth management and commercial lending businesses. In the process, banks hope retail customers will buy these non-retail products.

“Statistically speaking, digital innovation on the commercial banking side has been significantly slower than what we’ve seen on the retail side because it’s a more complex environment,” said Emily Steele, president of North America for banking software provider Temenos. “But now we’re seeing [digital innovation] expand beyond retail and mobile and into omni-channel and commercial banking, even wealth management.”

Like Temenos, technology vendor Finastra is seeing an “increased desire” from its bank clients to digitize as much of the commercial lending, wealth management and mortgage lending processes as possible, according to Steve Hoke, vice president of product management at Finastra.

More customers are demanding the “Amazon shopping cart experience” in commercial lending and other banking interactions outside of consumer retail, Steele explained. To provide this type of experience, financial institutions first need to remove the friction in the application and on-boarding processes, as well as enable back-end automation as much as possible.

Temenos helps its clients with this endeavor through its Temenos Infinity solution. “We use analytics to identify where in the process there is friction,” Steele said.

That could mean different things for different organizations. “For instance, in a loan application, where exactly is the customer abandoning the process?” Steele asked. “What we’ve learned is that, as a customer, if you have to stop and think about an answer, they abandon the entire application process. This tells us that the process needs to be more like Amazon’s shopping cart. The questions on the application need to be in a yes/no format. And the FIs need to automate as much information as possible so the customer doesn’t have to repeat anything that their bank might already know about them.”

Finastra, on the other hand, is working on introducing a tool that will allow bank employees to see the totality of a customer’s relationship with that bank, Hoke said. The tool is called Relationship Manager, and it will be available on Finastra’s commercial lending platform CreditQuest by mid-year.

Because the loan officer will be able to identify customers that are already banking with different departments of the same FI, this tool could help banks crossover customers from one business to another.

Customer crossover, especially from retail to commercial, is a challenge for many banks, even the largest ones. Recently, Sharon Miller, managing director and head of small business at Bank of America, told Bank Innovation that out of the 11.4 million BofA retail consumers that own small businesses, only 3.4 million bank with BofA on the small business side. “Figuring out how to translate [retail] consumers to small business clients is one of our biggest challenges,” she said in a recent interview.

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“It’s also about customer experience,” Temenos’ Steele added. “Putting the customer experience at the forefront of the digital journey in commercial and wealth management is going to be a big focus for banks.”