Lense Shift: From Competition to Collaboration?
A recent thought piece and E-Book from SS&C Intralinks provides valuable insights for both traditional financial services institutions (like banks and credit unions) and fintechs alike on the value of cross-organizational partnerships. They highlight the necessity of one organization’s strengths complementing the strengths of the other, and push back against the narrative that banks and fintechs are destined to be bitter rivals.
The pieces highlight that the hallmark of an excellent partnership between a bank and fintech, between traditional models and cutting edge ones, are, “mission-centered motives.” Those motives, in our view (and in Ravi Vakacherla’s, of People’s United Bank), flow from the disconnect between customer expectations and a bank’s present technological capabilities - the mission being to close that gap, so that the bank can provide a better customer experience.
Bringing CXM into View
The fact of the matter, and this is highlighted extensively in these pieces, is that traditional banking systems and platforms aren’t able to keep up with the pace of service and support that customers expect. That standard has been set by fintechs, who offer (near) all-in-one solutions that provide customers quick implementations and servicing for their products. In a rapidly digitizing society that is becoming more remote by the year, it is incumbent upon banks to keep up with the pace of customer demand. That is why partnerships are integral.
Customer Experience Management (CXM) keeps these developments, and their consequences for the marketplace, at its foundational core. That’s why CXM Platforms are developed, to better bridge the gaps that arise between banks, fintechs, and the customers they both serve. They serve as orchestration layers that tie loose ends together, eliminate silos and only partial views of the customer, and provide customers better insight into where they stand in a complicated process (which is a near-universal problem in the world of payment processing).
A Demand for Change
The Pandemic, as these pieces point out, exposed the need for organizational change and collaboration at scale between Fintechs and banks. The PPP Loan Process in particular made it clear that many in-branch processes needed to not only be remote and automated, but scalable as well. That means making sure that bank personnel have the technical expertise to service their customers from a distance.
Customer Experience Management platforms enable banks, fintechs, and other financial services companies to provide comprehensive services to their customers wherever they are. As banks and fintechs continue to collaborate in the future, it will be through the overlays and interconnections that bridge old processes with the new. This will have massive implications for lending, deposits, treasury, and other more traditional banking services.
