Digital Banking: Practical ways to capitalise on consumer insights

According to research, the vast majority of consumers receive information on financial products and services from friends and family. The other source is social networking sites such as Facebook, WeChat and Instagram. Seeking advice from financial advisors ranked lowly in the survey reflecting the low level of trust towards such professionals. This presents an opportunity for banks to develop digital platforms that could enhance customers’ financial knowledge and their money management. One obvious way is to tap into the social media networks to communicate with clients and strengthen relationships and thus build trust. Malaysians have been identified as among the most inclined to use social media. When a bank has a good understanding of its customers’ preferences, it may also want to change its product-centric approaches to those that are customer-centric. This may involve a change in business culture but is necessary to stay ahead of the game and beat the competition.

Another way to capitalise on customer insights, which is fast gaining popularity, is to use data analytics commonly called “big data”. Big data can help to extract and analyse massive amounts of information (i.e. consumer spending and transactional patterns) to detect correlations and consumer psychology which are otherwise hard to decipher. Such data are typically derived from mobile. An interesting consumer behaviour study by Gartner about mobile device privacy reported that generally, consumers tend to agree for banks to track the pattern of their mobile banking usage provided that the banks are transparent about their use of the data collected from those co-operating.