Banking Technology: Heads of Cognizant’s Banking and Financial Services, and Mobility Practices in the UK Write About the Next Wave of Mobile-Only Banking

“The speed at which the mobile market evolves is staggering,” write Tony Virdi and Ved Sen, heads of Cognizant’s Banking and Financial Services, and Mobility practices in the UK. “We have seen disruptive technologies such as the tablet really change the way we interact and go about our daily lives in recent years, both as consumers and within business. And newer devices including smart watches are poised to have a similar impact.” Excerpts from the article:

“The market moves so fast those mobile trends we were talking about three to six months ago as something for the future are now a reality for some financial organizations. Just as we started to look at mobile first, where banks need to align their services and strategies to cater for mobile before desktop or other traditional channels, the notion of mobile-only is now slowly creeping into the fore. There is no denying that there is a segment of digital consumers for banks that will only browse and buy products and services on their mobile devices.

The question is, are you ready for it? From our experience, many banks are still lagging behind. Others are being forced to change their retail model. It is also clear that the cost to income ratio for the mobile channel is much healthier than traditional channels. What is more, with the PC market in decline, there will soon be households that have tablets and smartphones, but no PCs—this is a reality in many places already. A simple test every bank should conduct is to explore how easy or difficult it is for consumers to sign up and conduct all of their transactions via mobile devices….Banks need to do all they can to put themselves in their customers’ shoes and judge whether they would be happy with the service and functionality of mobile applications themselves.

Another simple check is the micro-transaction. Consumers tend to break up longer and more complex tasks into much smaller, micro-transactions on mobile devices, as this fits not only the screen size but also the typical use case scenario.

The mobile-only customer is a reality today and their tribe, though relatively small, will undoubtedly grow to become significant. The opportunity to personalize banking products via digital channels helps to reposition both banking and non-banking services, increase wallet share and income, and hence provide an important driver for change. By identifying and supporting mobile-only customers now, financial organizations will be able to enhance their mobile operations and customer services to run better, while taking the innovative lead to stay one step ahead of the competition to run differently.”

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