Banks have been prioritizing providing an excellent customer experience (CE) supported by digital technologies that allow financial institutions to create ways to connect with their customers in an effort to strengthen their relationships. Along with efficient data insight, they have more capabilities to analyze customer behavior and find more opportunities to offer better services. As the industry is getting more competitive, banks and financial services companies need to start their digital transformation journeys to offer seamless customer experiences.

There are some key digital transformation trends that can change how today’s banks and financial services organizations operate.

We take a look at the 5 prominent transformation trends that are shaping the industry:

Open Banking

Open banking is a revolutionary system that allows other businesses access to the financial data of banks’ clients to provide new offerings and better user experience. It builds a collaborative eco-system of financial service companies and allows them to co-create value with external stakeholders.

By the adoption of the new technology and using open banking capabilities, a data-driven approach can be accomplished to provide better customer experience. While providing value by allowing banks to seamlessly integrate new products and services, open banking also gives more control to consumers by allowing them to manage how their data is used by other parties.

Public Cloud

Banks have been previously reluctant to store data on the cloud because of privacy and security reasons but it has now changed since Bank of America Corp. and International Business Machines Corp (IBM) have teamed up to develop a public-cloud computing service for banks. Although the rate of cloud adaptation seems low in the industry, there are increasingly many banks that have been moving to cloud technology.

With its security and scalability capabilities, the cloud offers more advanced options to handle customer data and to leverage data analytics. Also, by migrating to the cloud, financial institutions can deploy software development and application data technologies quicker and more effectively.

Artificial Intelligence (AI)

Today’s customers look for safety and privacy along with personalization on the services they are purchasing. Machine learning can provide banks with tools and services their customers need by detecting and predicting their behavioral patterns. AI algorithms help to improve credit decisions by learning user patterns and register those as secure interactions to prevent any suspicious events.

By investing in AI, banks can leverage new technology applications and offer a more personalized approach to their customers. Along with providing personalization by using voice recognition, AI helps banks to prevent human errors and identify risks on their operational processes by using automation capabilities.

Robotic Process Automation (RPA)

Robotic Process Automation (RPA) helps banks and financial services organizations to improve their productivity and customer service operations. In addition to responsive and immediate customer support, customers are enabled to make their applications and other tasks quicker using the automated processes.

Organizations can also reduce labor costs with RPA using its capabilities of efficient and quick answering customer support system. Adopting RPA allows employees to spend time on tasks that could bring more value to the organization by taking on manual operations that take a longer time. And as it evolves as a technology, RPA will also have a crucial role in fraud detection, digital onboarding, and other complicated processes.

Voice Banking

Increasingly more customers use voice assistants such as Alexa and Siri in their lives because of its convenience and this will transform how they interact with their banks. As voice technology improves, customers will be expecting to have a better experience where cross-channel actions will be seamless.

Through using voice technology capabilities, customers will be able to make transactions or payments by just using voice commands without having to use any other apps. This would make it a lot easier for elderly and less tech-savvy customers to use their banking services. And although there might be security concerns, the technology provides a voice-lock availability where only it registers one client’s voice and their commands.