Fintechs have taken advantage of digital transformation to drive progress in banking and focus on the customer. As millennials become the largest generation in terms of both the make-up of the workforce and the weight of their consumer value (by 2020 close to half of the global workforce will be millennials), the expectations for how services like banking should function has changed dramatically.
Coming of age in the digital era and entering adulthood alongside the dawn of the smartphone, this group has come to expect instant access to information and a slick digital experience. While nobody of any age enjoyed filling out paper forms, tedious queuing or trudging to a distant bank branch in the rain, digital natives simply won’t abide by it. Likewise, as Generation Z are now entering adulthood, a failure to meet these new digital demands comes at the peril of legacy organizations.
Challenger banks swiftly recognized and responded to this shift. Taking an experience-first approach, these innovators built apps that cut the busy-work out of banking. Focusing on simplifying the experience of everyday tasks - splitting a meal with friends, checking your balance or counting up the bills for the month, for example - led to skyrocketing user growth and fundamental changes in the way banking functions.
Understanding the needs of this new generation, as well as the unheard wishes of the customers of traditional banks that came before them, sounds simple. However, understanding those needs was only the first step. Responding to them required the ability to adapt and align rapidly.
To meet a fundamental change in customer expectations, fintechs required a fundamental change in the way the workplace functions. Building an agile work environment has been central to fintech’s ability to innovate.
Moving quickly can mean hitting bumps in the road, but by coordinating rapidly through channels to respond to any issues in real-time, financial institutions have been able to scale at a phenomenal rate while still offering the world-class customer experience it have built their name upon.
This approach represents a better way of working together by replacing email, which works poorly and limits each person’s view with channels that are transparent and designed from the bottom-up to offer a rich permanent, searchable record of knowledge, organizations can coordinate and align more easily.
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