Financial Services Innovation: Something Is Missing!

One bank that has led the innovation agenda is Barclays.In fact in the last few months Barclays announced the introduction of biometric finger scanning, as well as video banking. These innovations should improve both the customer experience and overall security measures... so are win-win for Barclays and its customers alike.Video banking in particular seemed to take a few people by surprise. However, it makes perfect sense, and is likely to become commonplace across the industry over the next few years. In this respect, Barclays is leading the industry, and should be congratulated.The Challenging part!The challenge, as all financial services companies know, isn't injecting a bit of innovation here or sprinkling a bit of magic dust here.Everyone struggles with embedding innovation into complex multichannel environments, constrained by organisational silos, competing executive priorities and balanced against a 'must do' regulatory programme portfolio.Providing a consistently good customer experience across multiple customer channels is hard now. In the future, it will can only really become harder!One bank customer review really jumped out. A Business Banking customer, told us about his difficulty in getting in touch with his bank.In his review, the customer started his customer journey via a broken web contact form, then went to Twitter, where after approximately 20 messages, a member of the business banking team, with no apparent knowledge of the Twitter conversation picked-up the phone. The customer labels this experience as 'the general mess of their communications.'Not so long ago, the use of twitter for many financial services organisation was in itself seen as a big innovative step. Engaging customers through multiple channels is great! But in this case the customer experience was clearly disjointed, and via Twitter Pete received replies from three other banks offering to take his business instead!


In this case, the customer's expectation was clearly not met, and multichannel engagement did not work.However, the future could be very bright!The pace of innovation will likely not slow down. In fact, we believe that there is some pretty inspiring innovation not too far away that will really please customers. This has the potential to be great news!Financial services firms will have to be better at implementing innovation, but also at performing all the core processes (e.g. making and receiving payments). After all, a beautifully designed app that doesn't work really isn't going to please customers for too long!Innovation won't build sustainable advantageThe innovation wave is picking up power. All organisations will join the wave, as no one can afford to be left behind. Some organisations will lead the charge, and others will do well to not fall too far behind.That said, looking across the industry, all financial services companies need to get better at communicating, managing customer expectations and being more open. This is probably the hardest nut of all to crack, but vital if sustainable competitive advantage is to be gained. We argue that it should also be central to the innovation agenda.Customers want to love the brands they shop, eat, travel and bank with! Innovation in financial services isn't enough. To truly build sustainable advantage, financial services organisations must lead the customer trust and transparency agenda.