No restructuring is pain free, especially in the complex business of financial services. And in the aftermath of the crisis, the industry has undergone widespread re-jigging through consolidation, merger, integration, compliance, cutback or transformation. Cost and effort apart, restructured organisations worry about how this move will impact the end users of their services. What is the risk that organisational restructuring will reduce customer convenience, impede access to staff or be negatively perceived? These concerns are both important and valid.

Although bank restructuring is full of stress, that need not spill over to customers.  Consider account management, which has a direct and appreciable impact on the customer relationship. If this were to be centralised and automated such that the entire organisation, instead of a single relationship manager, takes ownership of the customer, potentially, many benefits could flow.  The most obvious is that the customer is no longer exclusively reliant on the expertise, availability and tenure of an individual bank staffer; he now has the entire bank to go to. With multiple experts entering the picture, the breadth of advisory services expands to cover all financial products under the organisation’s umbrella, such as insurance, savings, real estate and commodities. Now, the customer need not wait for a particular account manager to show up – decision making is accelerated when the organisation is available at all times. And best of all, the relationship doesn’t have to be rebooted every time a staffer relocates. 

A banking relationship that is managed from start to finish by an organisational system also creates better opportunities for product acquisition for customers. This is because the bank has a holistic, unified view of the customer, including his needs, preferences, habits, risk appetite and financial position, and is therefore well placed to propose a bundle of offerings best suited to his context. A collateral benefit may appear in the guise of preferential tariffs on subscription of multiple products.

Last but not least, this arrangement makes the banking experience simpler and more effective by maintaining the continuum of customer interaction by recording every incident, and using both tacit and quantifiable information obtained during the interactions to improve the quality of the relationship. Moreover, the status is undisturbed even when the account holder moves to another city. As a result, the customer needs to spend less effort remembering, following up or coming to a decision – the restructured organisation does it for him, no matter where he is!