Banks and financial institutions face exceptional challenges in today’s fast-paced digi-sphere. The meteoric rise of digital communications and evolving customer behaviors have propelled digital products from the periphery to the center. Success hinges on the quality of the customer experience.
To compete, financial institutions must provide an array of real-time services to meet an expectation that’s been developed by the digital era and accelerated by the pandemic: customers demand a seamless omnichannel banking experience.
But for banks, this poses one serious challenge: the rigidity of their legacy IT systems means they have problems with scalability, flexibility, reliability and complexity. Fintech start-ups created in the cloud have a modern architecture that gives them the agility to adapt to market trends, the flexibility to innovate and the opportunity to maximize the user experience.
As a result, creative fintechs are turning heads in today’s marketplace because of their ability to provide a fast, seamless, personalized and easily accessible financial service. Banks and financial institutions must embrace cloud and microservices architectures that use real-time data to maximize the user experience and ultimately meet customer expectations.
Below we’ll reveal how a real-time data platform can accelerate the modernization of banks and surpass consumer and business expectations.
Instant data provides seamless user experience
Customers across all demographics want fast, easy and simple access to their finances through digital doorways. They also expect to use different channels depending on their objectives. They do research, gather information on investments or loans on the website, discuss with a banker or advisor the different options, and finalize the transaction over the phone, email or in-person. Often, they then hop onto the mobile app to check status or balances and then chat with support if they encounter any issues.
But banks may have ended up with disparate databases for each channel. Without a way to integrate the siloed data or use a unified data layer to present the 360 views of customer data in real-time, customers will face an incoherent experience when moving between the different channels.
Moreover, providing a seamless user experience isn’t just table stakes for banks anymore – deficiencies in any channel are enough to create friction and encourage customers to go to competitors.
Research suggests the bar has been set sky-high:
- 81% of customers would switch to a new-age financial provider if they offered a banking service that’s easy, flexible and accessible (World Retail Banking Report, 2021).
- 76% of customers want an omnichannel experience (Unblu, 2021)
- 59% expect on-demand customer service that’s accessible from any location (Unblu, 2021)
Transitioning from legacy IT systems to modern cloud architectures won’t happen overnight for many traditional banks. But the adoption of a unified operational data layer that acts as a superhighway from the backend systems to customer-facing applications will give banks the speed and flexibility to innovate and provide an omnichannel experience, and ultimately meet customer expectations all while this transition takes place.
But creating seamless customer experiences requires a real-time multi-model in-memory database. Using one that can provide the necessary data with low latency and high throughput will revamp the customer experience from top to bottom; lags will be eliminated, all interaction channels will be cohesive, promoting a seamless experience. Users will be able to instantly access their account information on their mobile devices wherever they are.
In addition, users can instantly search through their transaction history or understand where they are spending too much on their credit cards with an in-memory database that supports secondary indexing of their datasets and can query and aggregate the data in a fully distributed manner in real-time.
Banks need a real-time database to modernize without disruption
Banks and financial institutions need to modernize to meet modern-day expectations. Customers demand the seamless user experience that’s provided by the fintech disrupters. Legacy IT systems and Relational Database Management Systems (RDBMS) are still the backbone and system of records for many banks and will take time to update. A solution is needed which enables them to innovate and respond to customer expectations without disrupting these legacy back-office systems.
A real-time modern data layer provides a fast and powerful solution that many banks can pivot to while making the transition to cloud-based architectures. Redis Enterprise can accelerate this process by supplementing banks with a real-time database that guarantees real-time customer/client experiences. This results in better customer retention, acquisition and enhanced brand reputation, which in turn lead to growth and fending off those fintech disrupters.
