Banks are well equipped to win the customer loyalty race, says new Temenos report

Temenos (SIX: TEMN), the market leading provider of mission-critical solutions to the financial services industry, today launches its latest white paper "Experience-Driven Banking – A Race Banks Must Win" at the Temenos Community Forum (TCF) 2015.

The report lays out the competitive imperative for banks to stay ahead of a diverse and changing set of challengers, which now includes technology giants like Google as well as a burgeoning group of fintech firms. It calls on banks to seize on the opportunity afforded by digitization to become more involved in customers' commercial and financial lives, analysing their transactional data to provide them with expert advice, find ways for them to save money and proactively recommend the products and services they need.

The most successful companies, the paper contends, will be those that are able to marry this transaction analysis with analysis of customers' locational and contextual information to be able to deliver the right products, personalised to customers' circumstances, at the right time and over the right channel – what the paper refers to as experience-driven banking.

The paper argues that delivering experience-driven banking is a race against time. Banks are well placed to win the race since they have access to customers' transactional data. But, many of the new generation of competitors, such as Facebook, have a deeper reach into customers' lives. And, through payments initiatives like Apple Pay and Google Wallet, they are fast building data on customers' financial transactions

Banks will need to act fast to put in place the right capabilities. The paper, which looks at examples of experience-driven customer service in banking and beyond, discusses the kinds of measures that banks might need to take to be able to deliver experience-driven banking, ranging from system and technology renewal to cultural change.

Ben Robinson, Chief of Strategy and Marketing at Temenos and author of the paper, comments:

"Digitization both unbundles service provision as well as moves value away from production to distribution. We have seen this play out in other industries, such as media and travel. It is now happening in banking. Banks will need to move to become facilitators and trusted advisors to their customers, providing them with a gateway into financial and non-financial services and helping them to make the best-informed decisions. Banks are well-placed to take on this position, but they must act quickly to stop other, non-bank, competitors getting there first. What's at stake here isn't the future of the industry – we'll always need banks – but rather the role of banking. Either banks will become more integral to our lives or they'll disappear from view."