A recent report on The Disruption of Banking by The Economist highlighted that more than half of the banks are either ignoring the Fintech trend, or talking but not doing anything about it. In 2016, we are now seeing banks finally starting to tackle the emerging trends by partnering on many fronts, utilizing application program interfaces (APIs) and experimenting with innovations such as blockchain.

In this article on BAI Banking Strategies, I highlighted how customer engagement is proving to be elusive and what steps can be taken to overcome the challenges. The biggest challenge today is the defragmentation of the customer engagement front end. Banks need to be at the forefront, but are increasingly at the back end fulfilling transactions. They must take practical, simple steps to banking customer engagement, and possibly sidestep the traditional digital transformation journey as they grapple with customer engagement in today’s fast changing world.

First, omni-channel capabilities need to be looked at as a combination of capabilities and channels that are coming together to make magic. However, most reports and surveys out there ignore this and focus on “channel capabilities” – important but not enough. Instead of asking the question about which features must be made available to customers on which channel, we should be thinking of moving a customer along to the next step of their overall journey according to their expressed or implied needs. That may be the simplest way to tackle the burning question of contextual customer engagement and experience.The digital transformation agenda is almost too complex to make progress against. The underlying premise should be to create a customer experience that feels responsive and fresh, based on education and focused on the customer’s goals.

Second, the right approach for the future may be to prioritize key customer journeys, make them the top priority and do everything around them in an agile and incremental fashion. The reason is that all bets are off when it comes to the ideal tech architectures of the future even as these customer engagement improvements are needed now, not 12-18 months later. I took the example of a customer who’s logged in and browses credit cards or a mortgage. Try it. You’ll be surprised at what doesn’t happen. This customer journey approach also has the benefits of removing organizational silos and mobilizing everyone around the same overall metrics.

If you’re interested the entire article is on   BAI Banking Strategies.