Community banks and credit unions spent the past decade catching up to the big banks on digital banking – for example, offering apps and mobile deposit. These institutions now offer platforms that include online banking, mobile banking, and bill pay, and three-quarters of consumers under the age of 40 prefer to bank via mobile app or website. Digital banking is now table stakes, and organizations need to move to the next era of Intelligent Banking, which is the new bar.
The new question is: what is an Intelligent Banking experience? It’s no longer enough to simply have an online presence and a mobile banking app. An intelligent experience must anticipate customer and member needs, add value and solidify loyalty, whether the interaction happens in a branch, online, or by phone.
The shift from digital banking to Intelligent Banking
Intelligent Banking is not a single new product or feature. It means the app, branch, call center, and banker all understand the same customer and member journey, so the user does not have to start over every time they switch channels. To make that work, the institution draws on the data it already has, including account history, recent service interactions, and behavioral signals from the app, and reframes it as context any employee or system can act on.
For decades, branch, online, mobile and call center operated as separate channels with no shared memory or context of the customer or member. That fragmentation was once tolerable. It no longer is. Anything less than a perfectly seamless, continuous experience across channels clearly indicates to users that an institution does not have a proper understanding of them as individuals.
For example, a customer or member might begin a loan application online and then have to start all over again when they walk into a branch to complete it. This may give the consumer the impression that the bank does not even know who they are! But with AI, all of that changes. AI enables those silos to collapse into a single interface, yet does not require the tearing out of underlying systems. AI synthesizes what the app knows about the user with what the banker in the branch knows about that consumer. The institution is able to understand and act based on a unified view and a single relationship with that customer or member.
Why the branch still matters
Many are declaring the demise of bank branches and predicting the disappearance of banking personnel. But half of all customers and members report visiting a branch for complex issues, including opening a home equity loan, setting up a business account, or closing the estate of a deceased individual. And some customers and members like a branch visit as well as using digital tools. Trust is earned in the branch and for community banks and credit unions with limited resources, that is their greatest competitive advantage.
Until now, physical branches have been lacking user context when compared to online and mobile banking. Now, Intelligent Banking can fill this gap and change the way users are served in a bank’s branch network. For example, a consumer researching home equity loans online could be approached by a bank staff member in a branch with the offer to discuss loan options in more detail. This same contextual awareness applies when a consumer has started an online credit card application but never finished it – the branch conversation picks up exactly where the digital one left off.
What this looks like in practice
Think about a consumer who has logged in to a credit union’s website or mobile banking application several nights in a row looking at home equity loan rates. She walks into a branch the next morning to make a deposit. In a bank or credit union still operating in silos, that branch visit would be another deposit. But with Intelligent Banking, the staff person would see a flag indicating that the consumer recently had been researching home equity loans online, get a short prompt to ask if she needs help, and could introduce her to a lending specialist. This type of interaction may seem like a small thing but can have a big impact by creating value for consumers; distinguishing one financial institution from others, and helping achieve primacy.
AI as a force multiplier for employees, not a replacement
Many financial institutions bring AI to banking with the intention of diverting customers and members away from live humans, and towards more cost-efficient, automated channels for support. But this is not how Intelligent Banking works. Rather, AI delivers critical context and insights, empowering branch employees to better serve their users in real-time, versus reactively reading through call center notes.
Financial services institutions that have adopted intelligent AI-driven personalization in this way have seen a 15% increase in customer and member engagement, and 10-20% increase in cross-sell revenue. None of this is possible by removing the human element. It is just the opposite. AI is a force multiplier, making the human elements more effective.
What banks should be asking now
Many financial services institutions are now past the stage of debating whether to invest in AI and are instead questioning how they can leverage it strategically. Is it a new chatbot to overlay on an outdated digital banking platform? That is a tactic and not a strategy.
Intelligent Banking is, after all, a new way of enabling banks to offer better holistic consumer experiences – so a key question to ask is, how can AI seamlessly extend to improve experiences across interaction channels (i.e. online banking, mobile banking and in-branch). Or: when customers and members talk to your bank workers in person, do they find it to be a “continuing” conversation, or that they must start all over again each time they move between touchpoints? And, in the worst case scenario, does the conversation need to be reset for each subsequent employee or representative that consumers deal with? If so, the technology is not yet doing the work it could be doing to support and maximize a single relationship.
The goal of the branch and the app is to complement each other. Intelligent Banking is making that possible.
