Play to your strengths – Digital Banking Toolkit

Nadal is the king of clay. Given a choice of surface, I guess he would choose clay 9 out of 10.

We all get it – one should play to one’s own strength. Its obvious in sports, but most of us fail to apply the same rule(s) in business.

As most banks embrace digital, this is one rule we should not forget.

Look at the bigger PSU banks in India – it’s fair to assume that they have a big list of areas to focus on when it comes to going digital:

• Channel migration of customers onto internet banking and mobile banking
• Higher activation and spends on their credit cards
• Straight Through X-sell campaigns
• Improving the customer on-boarding experience
• Reducing TAT for customer transactions and queries
• …..and so on

It sure can be overwhelming to look at such a big list. One might also be tempted to look at the success stories of the likes of ICICI Bank, Citibank or HDFC Bank and try to replicate their strategies.

Will that work? Chances are it won’t !

Why? Because those banks are different. Different in terms of their customer profiles, their capabilities and their partner eco-systems.

When I look at the RBI’s data on ATMs, POS, Credit and Debit cards for Nov 2014 – its clear to me that for PSU banks, ATM presents a unique opportunity.

Digital experience starts from a conversation, an interaction or a transaction – and for PSU banks these are happening in plenty on their debit card portfolio at the ATMs.

SBI has 23.6K onsite and 22K offsite ATMs.And they had 2.4 crore ATM transactions !

Their digital strategy should have a clear ATM story:

• What opportunity does the ATM transaction present ? E.g. the bank knows where the customer is at that point of time. Using solutions like mTuzo they can share Offers-near-ATM and migrate customers from ATM to ATM+POS.
• Citibank has just launched Funds Transfer functionality through ATMs. Or one could do mobile recharges.
• PSU banks do not have an aggressive sales culture. This could be used to their advantage at the ATM, where its not a warm body pushing a product but maybe the thank-you screen which is “suggesting” a product basis past behavior of the customer.

Hence, for any bank embarking on a digital journey, its imperative to ask – What is our strength?

And align the roadmap to play to these strengths!