Niels Van Daatselaar, Co-Founder and CEO of TreasurUp, shares his thoughts and thoughts on the current digital transformation priorities for financial institutions post-pandemic, how he sees the new era of digital transformation impacting customer expectations and experience, and how the customer experience has been affected by COVID-19. Did it change after -19? Read on for Niels’ answer to learn more about the hot topic of digital transformation and how the fintech industry is adapting to the changing fintech landscape.
What do you think should be the three major priorities for the digital transformation of financial institutions after the epidemic?
- Develop customer-proven strategies and learn how to build value layers in your online offering beyond mediocre execution.
- Moving to an ecosystem model: working with a multitude of different companies (such as fintechs) that can complement the bank’s strengths. This goes a step further than traditional buy-or-build strategies.
- Be bolder in getting rid of legacy. Legacy infrastructure, and the people who maintain it, are slowing banks down.
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How are banks adapting to ensure they remain competitive with fintech-led challenger banks?
Banks still have many unique assets: balance sheets, knowledgeable people, products, customer base, IT capabilities, and more. The main challenge is to make better use of these assets.
What advice would you give banks on building resilient, future-proof digital transformation strategies to withstand future uncertainty?
Focus on providing clients with clear values that will make them want to stay and do more in the ban. To do this: provide real value in each channel, open up to other banks and service providers (bilaterally will change), develop a clear BaaS strategy, consider “connectivity”, review workforce agility and innovation, re- Consider annual plans, budgets, and project cycles. An important item here is how to move from a reactive service model (customer has a request > bank delivers product) to a proactive service model.
How do you see this new period of digital transformation affecting customer expectations and experiences?
Today, customers can easily switch between banks based on small preferences, such as efficient journey support. Pricing for all products has become more transparent, just like the actual service provided for this.
What are your company’s main priorities in helping financial services in this post-pandemic world?
TreasurUp is primarily focused on helping banks get the SME journey right: multi-product, multi-currency, multi-bank and multi-channel. This means our aim is to create wow effects for all SMEs through the use of our white-labeled online services by banks. Beyond that, we aim to provide our banking partners with refreshing new ideas, concepts and MVPs that they can validate with their client base, thereby keeping them ahead.
To what extent is customer behavior influencing the digital transformation strategies of leading banks?
Over the past few years, leading banks have been very keen to be at the forefront of the new digital age represented by APIs, artificial intelligence, blockchain and open banking. Our observation is that large global banks are open to partnering with fintech companies in an ecosystem model.
What are the main challenges you hear clients face when working with fintech companies?
The bank will ask questions like:
- Are they – us as fintech players – still around 5 years from now?
- How do we integrate their services into what our bank already has?
- Could our in-house IT department do better/less costly?
- Do fintech solutions meet our security requirements?
How do you see customer behavior and needs changing post-COVID-19? How will this continue to change?
Among our banking clients, we are seeing more and more SMEs switching from banks to online solutions. Today, bankers talk to clients over video calls, which changes that relationship. Banks have dramatically increased their online ambitions and budgets and are accelerating innovation.
Data is playing a bigger role in transformational strategies – how do we ensure we are effectively analyzing data to aid in data-driven decision-making?
Data analytics is an important factor for banks to do the right thing and improve their services. That means they need to first start measuring: how customers use our services, what options do they have, how satisfied are they. Ideally, this is done not by line of business, but by customer segment as a whole. Once banks get used to measuring, they can more easily transition to do more with data and move to actionable data analytics; both for customers and bankers.
