Technology is the future of transactions. Today, you can easily manage your financial life through your smartphone. Digital banks have been responsible for driving many of the financial sector’s innovations in recent years.
An increasing number of fintechs offer less bureaucratic, more transparent, free, and easy-to-administer solutions by cell phone: Fully digital accounts.
But their differential goes further.
With technology and user experience as starting points, digital banks compete with traditional institutions through the ease of online operations and the proposal to reduce and even remove costs.
Read on and find out what digital banks can teach us!
What are digital banks?
Digital banks are financial institutions that operate online. Service, credit analysis, acceptance, or refusal of customers occurs digitally and at a distance.
Digital banks have become a trend in the financial market. They are presented as an alternative to standard service, queues, and physical locations, characteristic of traditional banks.
As they operate online, digital banks do not have a physical structure like traditional banks (branches and service stations), which significantly reduces their operating costs but poses the challenge of finding new market differentials due to user distance.
User Experience: The Essential Pillar of Transformation
Digital institutions are gaining more and more customers, which is no longer a secret. The “new banks” very quickly understood the context of the digital age.
This understanding occurred by making users a central part of research and development strategies for new digital products and services. All this was built based on Design Thinking and UX research.
Digital banks are highly concerned with user experience, from requesting documents to the usability of the company’s app.
The design was based on facilitating user experience. This became the main engine for the entry and retention of customers.
In this sense, digital banks promoted a relationship never seen before between brands in the financial sectors and their customers. These new relationships were based on a series of factors:
Focus on usability
As all user transactions are online, digital banks must offer an intuitive and easy-to-navigate app that solves problems with ease.
Unlike traditional banks, everything is resolved remotely. Whether it’s to ask questions, apply for credit, make a limit increase, or even a deposit.
You can follow all transactions in real-time through the bank’s application, from creating the account, sending photos of your documents, even photo identification. The process is simple. After approval, the account is opened. UX plays a crucial role in building digital products. The user experience goes far beyond just a pleasant and easy-to-use interface.
UX has gone beyond the interface of digital banking applications. It encompasses the entire experience, including using the products and services offered. This means making unique services available to customers, offering the opportunity to get ahead and outpace competitors that use generic platforms.
Humanized communication is essential
In the digital sphere, which is becoming increasingly automated, digital banks offer other attractions. It is the essential humanized service that wins and retains customers.
In practice, these banks treat their account holders as if they were attending a face-to-face service. After all, there are no physical points of contact that customers can use to ask for help from employees. Taking advantage of online channels to deal with challenges in a more humanized way is essential.
The challenge here is to reconcile technology with humanization without scripted bots answering pre-recorded questions that only generate frustration and do not solve user problems.
De-bureaucratization hand in hand with practicality
One of the advantages that digital banks provide is their practicality. Forgot your access password? Has your card been blocked? In traditional institutions, going in person to a bank branch is the quickest and sometimes only way to resolve these problems.
The great differential of a digital bank is precisely this: everything is done through your bank app, without having to go to a physical branch, and during hours that regular banks would certainly be closed.
Everything is resolved with a few clicks. This is because digitalization is the basis of this process, favoring a dynamic and agile solution. While traditional banks are bound by “standard” practices, digital banks offer more practicality and less bureaucracy.
Information transparency is key
Although traditional bank strategies already consider UX as fundamental, the lack of transparency is still an obstacle to overcome. Understanding statement purchases, for example, is often a challenge for customers.
Users naturally prefer interfaces that make all useful information readily available to them. Many digital banks already invest in this type of communication. To be transparent, it’s not enough to simply make data accessible. It needs to be laid out with a coherent UX strategy in mind. Providing visibility whenever needed.
Why should the financial sector adopt UX?
The customer is the most valuable asset for any company and in the financial sector, promoting change is urgent. Rapid market changes are taking place, like increasingly innovative competition and even more aware and demanding customers. Making mistakes can be very costly.
The financial market as a whole has a lot to learn from digital banks, starting with placing the consumer at the center of its strategy. User-centric and techno-centric solutions are critical for optimizing the consumer experience.
The goal of UX is to create a user-focused experience, adapting processes, products, and services to their needs and demands, creating a personalized customer journey. Something that digital banks are doing very well.
Want to learn more about UX solutions that you can start implementing in your company today? Get in touch with one of our experts!