5 stories of financial services innovation to inspire your own
March 16, 2023 / Unisys Corporation
Short on time? Read the key takeaways
The financial services industry is embracing digital transformation and reaping its benefits. In this article, you will understand the following:
- Banks’ top priority in 2023 is to “improve digital experience for consumers,” according to the 2023 Retail Banking Trends and Priorities report.
- Financial institutions are using Unisys solutions to advance their operations and support their customers.
- Five major ways they’re doing this are by making online banking easier for customers, detecting and preventing fraud, ensuring regulatory compliance, increasing business opportunities and embracing digital transformation.
- How banking and financial services solutions, like those provided by Unisys, enable financial institutions to advance their operations and support their customers.
Like someone setting New Year’s resolutions or a prospective homeowner writing down must-haves for a new home, banks know their priorities. And those priorities are their customers and competition.
When asked their strategic priorities for 2023, 77% of banks worldwide prioritized “improve digital experience for consumers” — 32% percentage points higher than the next highest ranked priority (enhance data and analytics capabilities). Digital transformation to remain competitive with alternative digital banking providers is clearly top of mind.
Financial institutions are solving business challenges with innovative solutions, including how AI and cloud transformation are changing the banking industry. One of the strategies financial institutions, like banks and mortgage processors, are embracing is cloud-based storage to help them scale their infrastructure resources on demand. This makes it easier to satisfy compliance requirements dictating how you manage and analyze the data you collect.
Innovation never stops in the rapidly evolving financial services industry, and our financial services clients continually impress us with the ways they are advancing their organizations and helping their customers. Let’s consider five of their biggest achievements — and let their stories inspire your own efforts.
#1 – Make online banking easier for customers
The global online banking market size is projected to be $31.81 billion by 2027, growing at a CAGR of 13.6% from 2020 to 2027. In the U.S., most people with bank accounts (78%) prefer to bank online, either via a mobile banking app or on their financial institution’s website. The pandemic has increased customers’ preference for digital banking to check account balances, transfer funds, deposit checks or complete other bank tasks.
Unisys Digital Banking Solutions support financial institutions in their online and mobile banking offerings to customers. Full transaction capabilities include digital payments, wallets, biometrics, account onboarding and transfers. Financial institutions are using these capabilities to give their customers a major boost in user experience.
ACH Colombia SA turned to Unisys for expertise when developing a centralized and customized payment solution for online payment transactions. As a result, ACH Colombia SA increased customer use of online payments to 15 million monthly transactions, reduced branch operations costs and improved the customer experience.
“With this service, we are improving the quality of life of Colombians, allowing them to make payments anytime and anywhere, helping the government and companies to increase their collections and sales,” said Gustavo Vega, CEO of ACH Colombia SA.
Convenience goes a long way toward enhancing the customer experience. And convenience is something OTP Bank is prioritizing for its customers across Central and Eastern Europe, according to Tibor Johancsik, CIO of OTP Bank. The bank uses ClearPath® technology and services and Unisys Core Banking Solutions, which handle backend processes.
“Nowadays, it’s very important to be a bank with whom it’s pretty easy to deal with,” said Johancsik in the OTP video. “Our channels and our products should be simple. We should be available 24/7. That’s why we are putting so much effort into electronic means. That means you are no longer required to come into any of our branches to trade with us. You can get a loan immediately from your chair at home.”
#2 – Detect and prevent fraud
When people were asked about their top security concerns, bankcard fraud ranked No. 2, with 60% seriously concerned, according to the 2021 Unisys Security Index™. That’s up 4 percentage points from 2020 and was topped only by identity fraud in 2021 (62%).
Perhaps more concerning is the fact that only 49% of the 11,000 customers surveyed across 11 countries trust their financial institution to alert them to suspicious account activity.
Artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning solutions can help financial institutions detect cyber risks and boost customer confidence. You can create modern, engaging and secure banking experiences with Banking and Financial Services Solutions from Unisys. With our integrated risk-based adaptive behavioral and biometric profiling features, you can:
- Identify customers, authenticate access and validate documents and transactions in real-time
- Monitor your system and user behavior with AI technology to detect and signal abnormal or suspicious behavior
- Transform unstructured customer data into insight to enhance sales, service and product performance
- Prevent fraud and money laundering with real-time AI and ML capabilities, avoiding false positives
#3 – Ensure regulatory compliance
More than just about any other industry, financial services — including mortgage processors — must satisfy regulatory requirements. In a heavily regulated industry, this often means adding people to cumbersome manual processes, which can result in increased costs and poor customer experiences. One way to avoid this is by implementing compliant-by-design processes, which use built-in security and privacy.
Take Digital Mortgage Processing from Unisys as an example. This compliant-by-design solution helps you meet your regulatory obligations, improves the experience of people applying for mortgages and drives down operational costs. Use it to streamline key steps in the loan servicing process, including process automation, digital document management, correspondence management, loans management and complaints management.
Home loan expert RAMS in Australia considers operations partner Unisys, which manages the contact center and offers back-office support, “the engine room of RAMS,” according to Product Owner David Taylor. RAMS uses Digital Mortgage Processing from Unisys for a digital customer service platform with workflow, imaging and a single view of customer capabilities. Benefits include the increased ability to meet enhanced regulatory and operational requirements via improved service level agreements and compliance with Westpac policies.
“Our partnership with Unisys started in 2004 and throughout that time, we’ve had astronomical growth,” said RAMS Managing Director Jake Bromwich. “We’ve now got over 100,000 customers we’ve helped into their homes. Unisys is our operational partner, doing a lot of our customer after-sale service.”
#4 – Increase business opportunities
Product and solution innovation increases the loyalty of existing customers and attracts new ones. Technology solutions can make that possible. BOC Services Co. Ltd. Wanted to improve its phone support to Bank of China credit card holders, so it turned to Unisys for expertise.
With consulting services for call center inbound and outboard call processes and an integrated omni-channel application to support all credit card transactions, Bank of China increased issued credit cards by a whopping 39,900% — from 200,000 to 80 million — because of credit card support through its call center.
“By implementing a credit card services call center, we have been able to grow our credit card business, while reducing our costs,” said General Manager Zhang Lu.
Centralizing call center operations also enabled the bank to boost productivity and improve customer service, satisfaction and loyalty because the call center changes enable agents to answer calls by the second ring and handle queries more effectively with faster access to relevant information.
#5 – Embrace digital transformation
Like just about every other industry, financial services can realize major benefits — including agility and cost savings — by embarking on digital transformation Customers benefit too because this typically means:
- Mobile-first user experience
- Omnichannel capabilities to give users more access options
- Open banking to support online purchases and enable customers to use their preferred finance planning apps
- AI and machine learning for tasks, including data analysis and automated services such as chatbots and personalized messages
Banco de Costa Rica which has about 250 branches and nearly a million customers throughout Costa Rica, is using ClearPath and other Unisys solutions to launch innovative solutions and advance the business.
“This digital transformation is extremely necessary given the competition that we have at the country level from other financial institutions and taking a step forward in technology gives us competitive advantage over the rest of the banks,” said Database Administrator Luis Ramirez.
Advance your financial institution’s objectives
Financial institutions are using from Unisys to invest in the business and in technology that improves the customer experience. The many ways they’re doing this include making online banking easier for customers, detecting and preventing fraud, ensuring regulatory compliance, increasing business opportunities and embracing digital transformation. Use their stories to spark your digital transformation imagination as you tackle your biggest challenges.
