On-boarding customers: Make it easy
To grow the business, banks want new customers. The customer experience of the first interactions, the on-boarding, has become crucial. In the Open Banking context customers may do this using other services or marketplaces, which are not controlled by the bank. Customers have expectations that this can be done with few interactions with the banks and without additional meetings, phone calls with bank employees or dialogue with a chat bot.
Traditionally, several products and services have been bundled into a single agreement, like a channel agreement. This has led to a situation where it is not easy to sell one product or service to a customer. The customer gets the whole package, like it or not. In the worst case, the customer needs to be on-boarded several times.
Since Open Banking is very API centric, it provides an amazing opportunity to re-design how products and services are architected, so that they can be easily on-boarded one by one or as a package, as defined in the business strategy. Account opening is a great example: it requires you to “know your customer”, open a product, sign an agreement, archive the agreement and transfer money to an account. All core components for the digital bank, right? When product life-cycle management and operational functions are available via managed APIs, it gives an excellent opportunity for banks to bundle products and services as they want for both internal digital channels and for strategic partners.