The future-proof bank

Digital banking was essential even before the pandemic. However, with closed branches, hygiene regulations and short-time work, banks were forced to revamp and expand their digital services last year. Video appointments with the respective advisor:in were - metaphorically speaking - realized overnight. The question whether traditional, physical bank branches are still needed at all seems scary, but it must be addressed nonetheless. 

53 percent of respondents to a Statista survey answered the question: "Do you use online banking exclusively or do you at least still visit a bank branch with personal contact with bank employees now and then?" with "Mainly online banking, a branch visit now and then" (survey period April 2021). One year earlier, in a Bitkom survey again, 68 percent of respondents said that personal contact at the counter was important to them. The crucial point with digital banking services and the question whether branches in the traditional form are still needed at all is the personal, the "human touch. 

The trust of your customers, which is so important for you, has unfortunately often fallen by the wayside in the transformation accelerated by the Corona crisis. Consumers don't want to miss out on personal contact, including a visit to the branch, regardless of how much they use online services. 

Neo-banks such as N26 should also be mentioned at this point. Such online banks focus on low fees coupled with a high level of user-friendliness. The services are smaller than those of traditional banks. They also do not have an extensive branch network. The biggest advantage is that all transactions can be carried out via an app on a smartphone. But do neo-banks really have an advantage by focusing exclusively on digital interactions? We think: No! 

Because as already mentioned, the human touch is crucial for banks today - both digitally and in the branch. One of the most important drivers for the digitization of many banks is the increasing importance of customer experience. To continue to convince customers of the value of their products in the future, banks must meet the customer demands of the digital age.

Be the bank that customers trust!

Identify customer needs and share financial information in an informative and understandable way. Within a single interface, you get the foundation you need to manage customer engagement. Convenience and reliability are critical. So provide your commercial customers with a seamless onboarding experience that you continue to optimize through context-specific customer surveys. Also, bring consumers and businesses together on one platform. No more switching back and forth. This gives you a comprehensive view of different customer segments - and the bank as a whole. Understand the financial needs of households and businesses even better and optimize the mortgage business: a seamless lending experience that brings together loan applications, documents, accounts, and relationships in a single view. 

To give you an insight into how you can map this in Salesforce, we will now show you the most important 

Functions of the Financial Services Cloud: 

• Cases & AlertsLink financial accounts or customers to a specific case to trigger automated alerts. 

• RelationshipBuilder & Mapping: Link clients to households or trust funds to visualize key relationships and other important influencers 

• Relationship Center: Look at different relationship levels in one place, so you identify potentials and can take direct action 

• Financial Accounts & Upselling: Take a closer look at customer and household accounts and assets to recommend relevant products and services 

• Life events & business milestones: Create personalized and on-demand customer engagement by capturing and adequately supporting life events and milestones (e.g., birth of a baby, purchase of a home) 

• Action Plan: Manage customer requests consistently, using sample templates to track required tasks and documents. 

• Document tracking & approval process: Collection and storage of documents made easy, configure a release process and increase the traceability of the release status 

For more features, feel free to check out this datasheet from Salesforce. It remains to be said that the Financial Services Cloud can be flexibly combined with other clouds. To additionally optimize the customer journey and boost new customer acquisition, we recommend Marketing Cloud and Sales Cloud. AI tools such as Tableau CRM are also useful, for example for identifying trends. To find out which clouds our customers have chosen in your industry, please see here .

Which clouds we recommend you can here read more. Do you work in the financial services industry and would like to focus even more on your customers in order not to lose the human touch? We would be happy to show you how we can support you in this.