In our 20-plus year history of working with some of the largest banks in South Africa, Africa and the world, we have a good idea of the digital transformation pain points they need to solve.
At this time of rapid post-pandemic global change, one of the most pressing challenges – especially for larger banks – is how to go beyond digital banking transformation and actually transform their customer experience (CX). Not only do banks need to keep up with smaller startup banks and financial institutions that are ‘digital by default’, but also navigate their way through the possible quagmire of CX consistency across omni-channel delivery.
This can be a real challenge in a mixed IT environment that includes custom-developed online systems, front-end interfaces, and a variety of digital channels in banking, from websites to apps. And that’s where a customer engagement platform like Backbase comes in.
An industry-leading digital banking engagement platform, Backbase gives banks an easier way to create seamless customer experiences, unifying data and functionality from core banking systems and streamlining service delivery to customers through multiple digital channels.
As a Backbase partner, we’re already working with large banks in Mauritius and Kenya to help shape their customer-facing channels using a combination of Backbase and custom development. Like most large banks, their environments are made up of a mix of traditional and online services. Using Backbase in combination with custom development tools allows us to not only rapidly expand their services across multiple digital platforms, but more importantly make these service offerings more consistent for their customers.
Backbase is a dedicated front-end customer engagement platform. Unlike traditional web-based online services that require complex custom development to give customers access to data from legacy back-end systems via the web, Backbase is purely concerned with delivering a feature-rich, consistent customer experience across all customer touch points with minimal development work.
This doesn’t mean custom development is redundant. In fact, custom development still plays a crucial role as banks look to differentiate themselves from their competitors, and they’ll need to leverage their investments in existing systems to do so.
However, one of the main advantages of Backbase is its support for the developer-friendly Angular framework, which gives traditional developers access to common tools they can use to work in the new digital domain, allowing banks to retain their legacy skills while modernising their service delivery.
Backbase also appeals to designers with its integrated UX/UI design studio, giving them access to the tools they need to create a consistent CX without having to learn how to code, something banks have struggled to do in the past. At the same time, Backbase provides a complete back-end customer management module for managing customer interaction. This also gives management staff a 360-degree view of their clients, helping them maintain consistency across their digital channels.
At a time when time-to-market is critical to winning over new digital-savvy clients while retaining existing clients with improved services, Backbase helps banks shorten the delivery timeframe for new services while maintaining the value and utility of their custom-developed digital platforms. It also makes it much easier for banks to build and maintain a consistently excellent customer experience which, ultimately, impacts customer loyalty and is needed to accelerate their business growth.
That’s no mean feat in the highly competitive global banking sector.
