Pub. 5 2014 Issue 3

www.wvbankers.org 24 West Virginia Banker Banking is all about channels. And as the battle for customer acquisition and retention escalates, victory exceedingly hinges on a bank’s ability to provide an integrated channel experience that gives customers one place to logon, make transactions, ask questions—and get the same real-time answer no matter which channel they use. A ccording to a 2013 global consumer survey by Gartner 1 , of the more than 9,000 respondents aged 18-74, the breakdown of channels used at least once over a three-month period goes as follows: • 88 percent, branches • 85 percent, online banking • 33 percent, smartphones • 15 percent, tablets Based on its findings, Gartner asserts that financial institutions must consolidate customer-facing channel technologies into a single system, because multiple, channel-specific processes and data silos that can’t communicate with each other are no longer acceptable to consumers. Integration vs. Interface Years ago, most banks brought new products to market using the best-of-breed approach, which only required technologies to in- terface with their core. Core providers took care of such basics as demand deposit accounts and CDs, advising their bank customers to seek out their preferred channel products, and they’d interface to it. That yielded various providers exchanging information several times per day, with the different balances squared up once daily–at best. Today, channel integration provides bankers a better alternative. With integration, your core provider not only supplies your digi- tal channels, but also such ancillary solutions as document imag- ing, government watch list screening and network management. Integration allows your customers real-time account visibility no matter which channel they use, while the bank sees tremendous increases in efficiency. IBM’s report, The Value of Transforming Core Banking Sys- tems 2 , shows that channel integration produces measurable efficiencies that are hard to ignore, broken into these main cate- gories: • Streamlined Operating Environment. This is achieved through reduced operating expenditures, increased 1 http://www.gartner.com/document/2578917?ref=feed 2 https://www.ibm.com/smarterplanet/global/files/BKE03007USEN.pdf Get More From Your Core Through Digital Channel Integration By Nathan Tatum, Vice President of Business Development , CSI Meridian