How to respond to 4 challenges facing the European banking sector
Covid-19 showed that the financial industry had made huge strides towards the digitalization of its systems and workflows – but now that we are getting back to normal, new challenges are emerging.
In this blog, we highlight four of those challenges (of course there are more) and explore how the Apty, Digital Adoption Platform, is a game-changer in resolving them.
Find and retain the right talent
Banks, fintech and technology companies are engaged in a war over skilled staff, especially in IT. This was a headache for banks pre-Covid, but remote working eroded loyalty, making it easier to jump ship. And this is what happened, and banks are suffering from a “turnover tsunami”. As it is impossible in today’s tight labour market to recruit the required number of staff, banks are stepping up re-training programs to leverage the talents of their current workforce.
The Apty effect. A global bank adopted Apty because it was wasting too much time and money on training. Manual and web-based programs dragged on for five months as key workers struggled to get up to speed. With Apty, the bank got 30,000 employees across the line in just two months through automated onboarding and in-app support. While rival platforms take a shotgun approach to adoption, encouraging admins to create countless tooltips and walkthroughs, Apty applies a laser-focus to adoption. Through advanced tracking, the platform “knows” what employees need and can offer tailored on-screen guidance.
Get more ROI on digital transformation spending
It may not always look like it, but traditional banks have two huge advantages over the fintechs that are disrupting the sector: customer knowledge and customer data. To turn these into a real competitive weapon requires (yet more) digital transformation. Banks know this and have thrown money at the problem for a long time. All the same, there is a widespread perception that the majority of DX projects fail. The truth is banks don’t really know because they have often lacked the means of measuring success or failure and wasted a lot of resources as a result.
The Apty effect. Technology in and of itself is not transformative; it has to transform how people work. This is why it is crucial banks get buy-in from their employees and help them proactively to understand and use new technology. Apty is proven to speed up the adoption of new products or features by 60%. This is in part because digital transformation programs delivered with Apty offer customised training by role, location, or other custom segments. The platform dashboard tracks performance so you can quickly identify and mitigate bottlenecks in adoption. Digital transformation projects have a better chance of succeeding if you can be agile and transparent about the process, and quickly follow through on changes to that process. Endless intranet messages or emails will lead to information fatigue but with Apty, banks can target employees with relevant in-app messages, creating a clear flow of information and building trust.
Security
Banks have a fiduciary duty to protect the personal and financial data of their clients and have complex security policies in place to prevent breaches. Security requires constant vigilance. The price of regulatory failure is a loss of trust which financial institutions fear more than a potential punitive fine.
The Apty effect. Apty’s role in application security is one of supporting best practise such as gently reminding users of the need for diligence and accuracy when completing specific fields. It can achieve this through immediate help and instant access to up-to-date organisational policy and guidance documentation. This eliminates the need for a user to suspend their current task and seek the information elsewhere, something that may be skipped at busy times. This has the side effect of allowing the user to continue to focus on the task at hand rather than continually stopping and starting. The second way that Apty can help is to provide the business with a detailed analysis of how critical tasks and processes are actually executed. This analysis, via a real-time dashboard, provides invaluable metrics and insight into the number of abandoned tasks and the overall process completion time. Any individual cases that take an inordinate amount of time, may be worth further investigation or at least a review. Finally, Apty’s automation bot may play an important role in shielding users from information that is not relevant to their role and thus provide a way of tightening data privacy controls.
Put ESG front and center
This is huge. Customers want to see clear action on environmental, social, and governance (ESG) policies, and ethical investing is no longer a niche area. Banks know that if they cannot show themselves to be sustainable, they will cease to be relevant.
The Apty effect. The quicker a task is performed the more sustainable it is. Employees lose a lot of time figuring out new software and performing repetitive tasks. With Apty’s virtual assistant, tasks that would otherwise take 15-20 minutes, can be done in seconds. Also, more effective training programs enhance sustainability because the faster an employee is contributing to productivity the fewer resources you use to create value.
This is just a snapshot of the questions being asked of European banks post-Covid 19– and we have outlined just a few of the transformative answers the Apty platform provides. For a full demo of Apty’s capabilities, please find us here.
