How Are Traditional Banks Adapting to The Digital Age?
The digital revolution is underway and has disrupted many sectors, including the banking sector. Traditional banks, long anchored in traditional operating methods, have been forced to adapt to survive and remain competitive in this constantly evolving digital environment.
The emergence of online banking has led traditional banks to rethink their offering and their relationship with customers. Indeed, online banks offer faster services, competitive prices, and great ease of use thanks to intuitive interfaces. To respond to this growing competition, traditional banks have invested in developing their own mobile applications and online platforms, to offer their customers services similar to those of online banks.
The revolution is technological, but is also a revolution in customer behavior, including customer’s relationships with banks. Customers are starting to become more demanding and want faster solutions than face-to-face advising.
What Digital Services Are Traditional Banks Offering?
Faced with the emergence of digital technology, traditional banking agencies have adapted by transforming their spaces and their services. Today, we are seeing a deployment of interactive terminals and ATMs allowing simple and quick banking operations. Agency advisors are more oriented toward advice and personalized support.
To make life easier for their customers, some traditional banks even offer online meetings or assistance by chat or videoconference. This transformation aims to reconcile traditional agency services with new customer expectations in terms of digital technology.
In the era of digital transformation, it’s crucial for conventional banks to lead in innovation, consistently introducing new services aligned with customer needs. We advise customers to stay updated on online offerings, ensuring they fully understand the digital shift for a more convenient and personalized banking experience, but mainly to make their lives easier.
Robo-advisors have also made their entry into the field of life insurance and wealth management, shaking up the role of advisor. These innovations mainly target small savers, first-time entrants who can monitor the performance of their investments in real-time using very simple interfaces, give orders, simulate the benefits, or trust the management of their portfolio entirely to algorithms.
How Can Traditional Banks Compete With Digital Natives?
Traditional banks have also turned to complementary services to attract and retain their customers. We now find offers for financial coaching, wealth management, online real estate credit, and even online trading. The objective is to offer each customer a personalized banking experience to meet their specific expectations.
Faced with this digital revolution, traditional banks need to keep up with innovations and continually develop new services that meet the needs of their customers. Traditional bank customers have to regularly inform themselves about new features and services available online, to take full advantage of this digital evolution and benefit from an increasingly easier and personalized banking experience that many banks offer now.
Are Traditional Banks Becoming Obsolete?
The digital transformation is underway. The smartphone has become the best ally of increasingly connected citizens, constantly seeking to simplify their lives, using innovative applications and services. And the financial sector is not spared in any way from these new demands.
The consumer has become less and less dependent on his bank branch. He is more informed and more demanding thanks to the numerous sites comparing the offers and services offered. He can, at any time on various forums or on social networks, leave a negative comment on his bank if he is not satisfied.
To respond to these new modes of communication, banks use social networks to be able to control their image and respond to changes in consumer habits. Alongside their presence on social networks, traditional banks are digitalizing all their services.
They are also developing more and more mobile apps and adding numerous features for customer service aiming to make life easier with their “paperless” option and reducing the need to visit a bank branch for minor problems and concerns that customers can handle by themselves with assisting AI technologies.
For years, consumers have suffered from the technological lag of traditional banks. Since the advent of fintech companies, banks have struggled to provide their customers with the level of innovation they expect.
To meet the growing demand for speed, efficiency, and simplicity, service providers must integrate new technologies, which will allow them to offer the fluidity that their customers expect. After all, If an online sales giant like Amazon allows you to complete a purchase in seconds, you shouldn’t need an appointment to open a bank account.
What’s The Future Of Traditional Bank Branches?
Digital transformation is not a new phenomenon, but it must happen faster. Financial institutions need to take advantage of the digital shift to nurture their engagement with their customers, focus on efficiency, and help them achieve their goals in terms of innovation.
Traditional banks have had to quickly adapt to the digital age to counter the rise of online banks. Thanks to their different initiatives and their ability to reinvent themselves, they manage to reconcile the best of both worlds, by offering efficient online services while maintaining physical agencies to meet the specific needs of certain customers.
Traditional banks will always remain, as they will surely transition to digital solutions, as they are currently doing, over time. The digital revolution continues to evolve and we are convinced that traditional banks will continue to adapt to offer an ever more innovative and personalized banking experience.
How Can Traditional Banks Improve Online Security?
With online banks, the vast majority of transactions are carried out via the Internet. One of the main risks is data piracy. As such, online banks have every interest in doing their utmost in the fight against cybercrime. With new technologies like Apple Pay and PayPal comes the question of the security of transactions and banking data.
Traditional banks quickly recognized this challenge and implemented sophisticated cybersecurity systems to protect their customers against fraud and hacking. They have also developed strong authentication solutions, such as biometric recognition, to strengthen the protection of accounts and online transactions.
These new alternatives do not necessarily or only barely comply with very heavy regulations, which poses numerous problems in terms of compliance and pushes them to join forces with traditional banks to combine their strengths to offer new secure services to as many people as possible and at advantageous prices. Traditional banks will certainly not disappear immediately if they continue to invest in fintech to offer services that meet or anticipate consumer needs.
See you in the next post,
Anil UZUN