Hello, and welcome to the buzz of bank automation news podcast. My name is Whitney McDonald, and I’m the deputy editor for bank automation news. I’m joined by Kristiane Mandraki, Director of Business Development and Marketing at Praxent. She discussed the ongoing digital transformation at financial Kinstitutions, and how FIS can lean on automation to improve their customer experience.

00:30
I think it is a really interesting time for banks and community financial institutions as to how to really differentiate and lead in this new digital world. So one of the big trends that’s coming to us is kind of the front door issue, I guess. So a lot of them spent a lot of time and effort sort of, like since COVID happened implementing very new digital account opening or digital loan origination or their new online banking and mobile banking, like those types of products. And they’ve done a great job. But essentially, they’ve built this house, that’s beautiful once you get into it. But one of the consistent themes that we’re seeing is they realized that they kind of forgotten about the front door to the house and the front door being their website, the website that they have is the way in which customers find you and then go start the process of opening a new account. And so when they’ve, they’ve made a decision when they went to implement the sort of off the shelf, account opening or loan origination products, that it didn’t make sense from a revenue generation point of view to build that custom, they probably didn’t have the expertise in house to really be able to be good at that. And so now they’re kind of running into the same question with their website. They have marketing teams who are amazing when it comes to marketing channels and SEO and getting people to the website. But there’s a different skill set. I think that’s required for improving the user experience on those sites to get them through that flow. How do you when someone comes on like what do they want to see? Like what how do you deal with the fact that some people are coming on who are already members of a credit union and they want to log into their digital banking account? How do you deal with those people versus the people who are looking to open a new loan, versus the people who want to open a new account should at that point, should you be telling them like oh, you can only be a member if x y Zed it’s how you fit in all of those different potentially competing personas, to create an experience that’s simple and easy. And really drives conversions at the end of the day, on the sort of forgetting about the front door side of things that we’ve had a lot of, of banks and credit unions coming to us, who have decided to invest in that experience, and figure out how they can really improve that conversions, whether it’s loan origination or new account openings. And so in many cases, what they’re coming to us with is it actually many cases, they’ve implemented a new account opening or a new loan origination system. And a lot of those products are very flexible. And there’s a lot of different ways in which you can configure them, you are given a lot of ownership over how exactly you want to word certain things. And in many cases, like the wrong word can cause a lot of friction and confusion to people. And if you don’t understand what you’re being asked as the user, it can stop you in your tracks. And while there was one example, actually, so Mary West Credit Union, and so they came to us, and they’ve done a lot of analytics, they could tell you exactly where people were dropping off within their experience, but they couldn’t figure out why it was this sort of, there’s something wrong on this page, but we don’t know what it is. And so in this case, what we recommended doing was last week, first we did a UX audit, which is where we have our designers kind of go through and pick out based on like UX best practices, and there’s about 10 Different laws that the designers abide to. And they pick out ways in which those heuristics are being are not being met, and scaled down on like a priority. Like how problematic is this five being like, it’s literally going to stop someone and they’re not gonna be able to continue the process. And so that’s a pretty good way of picking out like, high impact, low level, fruit off the bottom of the tree kind of stuff. But then more, I think, more importantly, that’s when we kind of got into user research. So the best way, I think, for banks and credit unions to really have that human interaction and understand what can differentiate them and understand how to create really delightful experiences is to really speak to your users. And so in those cases, we did a number of user interviews with, with our prospective members, asking them to go through this experience to apply for For a new account,

05:02
and as they’re going through, like, they stopped and all of the same pieces that they were finding in the analytics, but we were able to ask them, like, what’s confusing? You hear? Like, what, why? Why are you stuck? And they’re, they’re talking out loud, they’re like, I don’t understand what this means or, or I don’t like, what does it mean to become a member like, even like questions as simple as that can kind of come out of like, I don’t know what it means to be a member. And, and that’s something that when you’re working within a credit union, or even just within the financial services industry, you can kind of take for granted some things that seem really obvious to you, but are not customers. And so, understanding those little things can make all the difference in like really increasing those conversions. And so I really do think there’s gonna be a lot now that everybody’s kind of, but now that people are for the most part, getting their new loan origination or account opening experiences implemented, the next step is definitely going to be to sort of optimize those websites and make them make their front repainting the front doors, let’s say.

Whitney McDonald 06:07
And now where does automation fit into that?

06:10
Yeah, definitely. I think automation has a huge role to play in this stuff. I think it has to be, it has to be implemented carefully, though, because I think, traditionally, in banking, there’s been in financial services, in general, actually, a lot of the software that was implemented has been system centered. So a lot of the ways in which people worked previously was based around manual processes, right? Like you want to apply for a loan, you have to like the underwriter needs this, this, this and this, and that has to go there and all of that. And so they built software that resembled that. And so with automation, there’s a huge amount of opportunity to like, speed up those workflows. But I think it has to be done within the context of a user experience. So ideally, you put that first you you do a human centered software that is thinking about, Okay, this person’s wants to apply for a loan, like, what questions do they have, and I think, especially when community financial institutions can really stand out and differentiate themselves, the sofa size of the world and Navarro banks, they’re not really and the Wells Fargo’s as well, like, they’re not really based around. They’re based around volume more than anything, though, not really necessarily so much based around nuance of people. And the reality is people aren’t really like black or white, they, their financial situations are different. Like if you want to apply for a land loan, there’s more detail that’s required in there. And so I think where community financial institutions can really do well, is to think fast if the customer experience and how they can manage both volume and that nuance, and then start automating the back end processes that really will have an impact on the customer’s experience. Like once you’ve sent all your documents in, all of that is all kind of behind the scenes, they don’t need anything more from you, like automate all of that, make that quicker, that’s a much better experience. But be very careful. I think automating the upfront stuff where it could add it could benefit the company and might could benefit the bank and or the credit union and reduce some of their effort. But you’re you could be adding more effort for the user. And that’s you’re going to struggle, if there’s a competitor who isn’t doing that, in many cases, especially Community Financial Institutions, or people are really what makes those organizations so special. And what is like the stories that come out of community banks and credit unions is always to do with the people and how the the people who worked at the bank or the credit union went above and beyond to help other people. So like don’t replace those people. You don’t need to like that’s, that’s kind of your special sauce. Like, I think I’m really focusing on the back end stuff. But isn’t that is a great point.

Whitney McDonald 09:02
Can you give some examples of some of those processes on the back end that might benefit from automated systems?

09:09
Yeah, I think a lot of the underwriting when it comes to loan origination, and there’s been a lot of automation things that you can do there. Some of the big ones that we’ve seen around the way in which you review documents and the way that information is taken from those so that it’s not a person sitting there like reading through it. Instead that you can, there’s a lot of technology that can come in to significantly speed up those types of processes. And the more you especially with those type of AI based machine learning based products, the more you do it, the better they get. And so you’re only kind of like capture like when you’re training capture like it gets better and better. Right. It’s the same thing with how you view payslip information and all of that type of stuff and it can just be done a lot quicker, versus a single person going through and like checking your payslip and checking their status mean? Yes,

Whitney McDonald 10:01
great, thank you. Now wondering if we could shift into maybe any examples, or any of your clients that are doing this well are progressing well, in this space of finding the fine line of automation with customer experience. And also people in the mix too.

10:17
One of the things that we’re seeing a lot of is robo advisors and financial advisors, robo advisors being able to sort of serve a lot of the, the the younger accounts, I guess, those with like less money and less money in the bank, and still have those financial advisors there to serve those accounts, which are more established. And so one of the interesting ways that we’ve seen a lot of people working is this hybrid approach of have both have the technology there for volume and for servicing those accounts that are slightly less valuable now, but still capture them, and then use the human touch that for financial advisors, we’ve even seen, we did one project with it was a financial advisory firm. And they had us build a it was a robo advisor and, and also, but also our kind of financial advisor, profile product of Ebola. That was for the Henry generation. So high earning not rich yet is that is what that means. So they’re really targeting like lawyers, like lawyers, legal students, and doctors, students, things like that. And so a lot of what we were doing, there was sort of figuring out how we can automate or create workflows out of some of the traditional things that financial advisors are asking them and provide them with custom, custom, automated recommendations about how to improve their financial lives. So hey, you don’t have an emergency fund, we recommend you start first by saving $2,500 whatever maybe. Or, hey, like, you’re not maximizing your you’re not maxing out your IRA, we recommend you start doing that, like, here’s the amount of money that you need to do to do that, those types of things. But then they also have a really cool, their subscription product. And they also have a really cool hybrid option, where you can have like, you still have a financial adviser who you can speak to. So you have this application. And within the application, it gives you those recommendations, but it also gives you the ability to kind of invest with as a robo advisor with different profiles, sort of based on your risk tolerance. But then also, you can speak to one of their financial advisors and sort of pay a subscription to get that and I think that’s a really good balance and something that credit unions and banks could definitely do to kind of walk that fine line as well. So that’s that’s one of the cases I’ve definitely seen.

12:56
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