CEB Banking Post

Financial institutions must continue to take strides toward digital transformation in order to realize competitive advantage. Digital transformation in commercial banking is well underway and commercial banking IT leaders expect the strategic importance of digital innovation to increase dramatically over the next two years. However there is still progress to be made, as only 33% of bank technology executives currently agree or strongly agree that their digital capabilities are a differentiator for their firm.

We examine digital innovation across three categories: data analytics, digital channels, and automation. And while banking executives understand the importance of digital innovation as a source of commercial banking competitive advantage, there is often no corresponding prioritization in actions or spending. Bank inaction in digital innovation risks leaving customer data—which is key to winning customer loyalty—uncollected and unanalyzed. When leaders are planning their technology spend for future years, digital transformation can seem like an impossible mountain to climb. Cross-functional, enterprise-spanning projects can certainly overhaul your competitive position, but on timelines and budgets that are daunting. In reality, digital transformation can happen (and does happen effectively) on a much smaller scale. An incremental approach is often best for making additive efficiency increases.

Starting with one incremental investment can yield big returns. Take customer onboarding for example. How smoothly onboarding happens sets the tone for a customer’s long-term relationship with your company. In fact, 90% of corporates are willing to consider a different financial institution for better client services in onboarding, account maintenance, service requests, and inquiry handling. Yet alternative providers are consistently outperforming banks on key onboarding process attributes. Banks can immediately improve onboarding by removing friction and redundancies in information management. Automating paper-based processes where possible would also eliminate time searching for physical paperwork and irritation in asking the customer multiple times for the same information.

Document capture then, is integral to digitizing banks’ onboarding processes. Document capture integrates paper documents into workflows and allows this critical information to be accessed anywhere. It also enables automated workflows, reducing the amount of time employees spend on repetitive, manual tasks. Automating workflows provides opportunity to reduce inefficiencies and speed processes, thus meeting customer expectation of intuitive, seamless, and effortless onboarding.