What are the current needs of corporate banking customers? To this day, they still demand managers whom they can fully trust, along with products and services for their financing and transactional needs. Now, however, they desire even more. They want the relationship with their bank to be simpler and more direct, while also wanting to do more operations digitally.
The reinvention of the customer experience model has already advanced one step further in retail banking. Corporate banking, however, has lagged behind in this process. This is for several reasons, primarily the high complexity of clients and products alike and the low level of standardisation in products and services. In addition, the cost of making mistakes can be very high, either from failing to comply with regulations or from the business impact of bad loans.
In this scenariohow should corporate banking address the need to reinvent its concept of relationship with its customers? It should focus more towards the customer experience aspect than towards its product offering. Moreover, does the corporate bank understand the real needs of the treasurer and financial manager, to develop the optimal customer experience for them?
In corporate banking, around 30 different customer experience models can be distinguished. Therefore, by applying the necessary changes to implement this range of new relationship models, changes are put into effect in both internal processes and systems.
When the corporate bank has a complete vision of what its customer experience model should be in the future, it will have to prioritise. Because it will have to decide which is the customer experience model that best adapts to the processes of digital transformation, and that can therefore count on the support of the entire organisation.
Multidisciplinary tools
Introducing the new customer experience should be swift and agile, and should be executed through multidisciplinary teams and tools. Both customer relationship managers as well as product, data and business intelligence specialists ought to be involved. Credit risk managers and analysts should also play a role, because this transformation is an activity based on internal processes related to the implementation of the new relationship model. In some of these processes, for example in onboarding (the receiving model for new customers), it is critical that the new model meets regulatory requirements.
To achieve sufficient visibility among different organisations regarding the new customer experience model, achieving tangible and rapid results is absolutely vital. Corporate banking firms, therefore, need to ensure that this new relationship model is configured as one its main pillars in the development of processes focused towards digital transformation.
Finally, if the corporate banking firms want to meet the challenge of providing a renewed customer experience, they take into account the opinions of a prior selection of their main clients. This is to ensure that, in the future, the entire customer base appreciates the advantages and the effectiveness of a new relationship model adopted by its preferred corporate bank.
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by Ole Bendik Heggtveit
Principal at the Boston Consulting Group and expert in digital corporate banking