Although digital transformation was seen as a luxury for financial services companies in the pre-pandemic era, today it’s a necessity for every organization in the industry. Global investments in digital transformation are on track to reach $1.8 trillion in 2022, a 17.6% increase from 2021. And it won’t stop there: spending is expected to double by 2025. While many financial institutions focus on implementing the latest cutting-edge technology, many overlook the importance of creating holistic B2B and B2C experiences, important differentiators for businesses.

Customer experience (CX) is at the very core of digital transformation. The digital-first mindset has raised the expectations of every consumer looking for a simple, fast, and personalized digital experience. Consumers expect offers to be personalized 100% of the time. To get there, companies need to focus on understanding the user’s motivation and behavior. The goal is to create a frictionless experience that increases engagement with their financial institution. Systems that understand what customers like and don’t like create stronger, more engaging, and trusted relationships between users and brands. 

Before undergoing a digital transformation, it’s essential to work backward using a human-centric approach to understand why an organization is undertaking a transformation and the target audience for its new digital initiatives. While the customer and their user journey are extremely important, it’s equally important to understand the organization's processes and the people involved for a successful and holistic transformation. 

Any business undergoing a transformation must go beyond the product strategy. To transform the products and services a leading wealth management firm provides to financial advisors, our team needed to look not only at products, but at the full customer and advisor journey across different stages. This holistic approach helps ensures that any team, in this case, advisors, are comfortable and equipped to provide their clients with new services and experiences. Understanding what your internal team cares most about in their daily operations gives businesses first-hand insights into friction points and issues in their existing experience. That enables businesses to bring the right platform, products, and data to design and build a premium customer experience for their people and their clients. 

While digital financial transformations can create easy-to-use consumer apps, they also provide institutions with digital tools to work more efficiently. We encourage clients to look at consumer experience models within the context of an enterprise-level application. The goal should be to make the internal day-to-day working experience as easy and seamless for internal teams as it is outside the work environment. 

Take fintechs and financial institutions as an example: helping them to identify opportunities to use automation and visualization technologies to move faster to diagnose issues with transactions is a game changer. For a payments-related project, our team detailed the end-to-end employee journey of the treasury and payment services team to assess gaps and make improvements to their workflow. In this instance, the treasury and payment services team’s top priority is knowing where the problems in a specific transaction occurred, not necessarily that the transaction wasn’t successful. They need the tools and resources to understand where the failure in the process happened to help them immediately deploy resources to fix it, providing a better customer experience. 

Digital transformation is becoming more critical as financial organizations fight to attract and retain new customers. Incorporating a holistic and human-centric approach can help organizations create thoughtful solutions that improve their customer's experience, business capabilities, and operational efficiencies. This approach allows organizations to equip their employees to serve their clients better while re-imagining their existing set of products for the future.