Winning back your customers’ faith is among your top priorities. You are approaching this in two ways – first, improving transparency in compliance with stricter regulation, and second, restoring your customers’ confidence through better education and empowerment.

Arguably your need to “right” disseminate, inform and educate has never been greater. You have to ensure that the right information is at hand whenever and wherever your customers ask for it. But marketing budgets have been slashed, forcing cutbacks and compromise. Does that mean that the fate of your communication agenda is up in the air? Yes, actually!

Progress in cloud computing/hosting technology has made it possible to run a high impact information dissemination campaign at low cost. Banks can host their marketing collateral, product literature and other materials with a technology vendor or third party data centre under a variety of “pay per use” arrangements ranging from simple and ASP-based hosting to outsourcing and SAAS.

The consumer marketing paradigm has been changed by the cloud-based social networking phenomenon. That paper based communication is passé, is old news; now, it is anticipated that email will follow suit. Since the balance is tilted in favour of (Gen Y) consumer pull versus marketing push, marketers, including those within the banking industry, have to reach their tech-savvy customers in popular hangouts such as websites, social networking forums, online communities, and so on. Banks can learn from other businesses that are ahead in this game, such as retailing companies which have a strong presence in online social messaging and networking sites.

No doubt, adapting to cloud-based marketing and communication will take some doing. The flip side is that this will bring down the banks’ cost burden, while enabling them to achieve key marketing goals including understanding popular consumer sentiment, launching better targeted campaigns and providing faster complaint resolution.

Not just communication, even the costs of channel infrastructure can be split between institutions by putting them on the cloud, or entering into an ASP-based or third party hosting contract. Besides sharing the ATM network, Internet Banking site and Call Centre, banks can hand over the management of customer facing and support activities – like the Internet helpdesk or contact centre – delivered over these channels, to specialist professionals, and pay them according to the volume of work or number of customers serviced. As an extension, educational/information services such as financial planning tools and audio visual remote advisors can also be included in the arrangement. In this manner, banks can achieve their twin goals of converting a part of fixed expenses to variable costs without compromising their ability to educate and service their customers.