John O’Brien has over 24 years’ experience across the banking industry. He joined PTSB Bank in February 2000 and gradually worked his way across Retail and now leads the Digital and Direct Division. John has held a number of senior management roles across Retail which covered Strategy, Managing Business Growth, Digital Transformation, E-Solutions, Robotics, Credit, Audit & Risk, Product and Proposition Development, Commercial Revenue, Acquisition, Marketing, Stakeholder Management, Investigation, Negotiation, Private Banking, Retail Sales and Service Distribution.
O’Brien’s formal Masters and Banking Executive Education coupled with an innate business sense, complements and helps propel this efficient, energetic and successful Bank forward. In 2022 under John’s multi-channel leadership and oversight the Bank has undergone significant digital transformation recently which has focused on digitising most of its products and service suite offering. PTSB Bank focuses on fusing the digital and the physical of how we work to ensure customers and colleagues can interact seamlessly across our channels. Our journey continues as we look at new ways and new initiatives to deliver greater customer flexibility and centricity to self-serve at a time and place of their choosing.
Through this article O’Brien discusses the evolution of digital banking and its impact on customer experience and banking operations.
At a time where our iPhones have become indispensable, the way customers connect with banks continues to evolve. The acceleration of continuous digital improvements and change has replaced the days of waiting in long queues to perform remedial and routine tasks, which can now be self-served by the immediacy and convenience of digital banking. This evolution has provided customers with complete control over their finances, that enables them to check their account balances, transfer funds, pay bills, apply for loans, to even opening a current account for a new customer. This provides customers with so much convenience however the real value lies in the enhanced control and visibility that digital banking services offer.
"We are guided by what our customer wants and needs and to support this we focus on bringing digital and people together to make every day easy, so our customer can do big things"
Customer experience is at the centre of digital banking and banks are laser focussed on designing digital journeys that supports a customers’ financial and transactional needs. Within these designs great care must be afforded to ensure digital journeys don’t carry any unnecessary friction, whilst ensuring they are smooth, intuitive and user-friendly for customers. Creating a continuous customer feedback loop that is integrated on your banking app is crucial, as this allows you to have an always on approach that aligns to how our customers feel, what improvements could be made and what they want to see next in the digital journey space, at a time the digital banking landscape continues to change.
Digital is a key enabler for colleagues as well. In the past contact centres have been pointed towards completing routine activities however they now assume a new direction to educate customers towards digital which will increase digital banking literacy. By embracing this blended approach, the digital adoption of customer journeys will improve along with customer’s perception of digital trust. While most customers are comfortable to self-serve for routine and repetitive activities, ongoing communication is required to activate all customers digitally, through push notifications; Interactive Voice Response (IVR) routing, messaging; monitoring and managing social media; introducing interactive elements to a website; to using a webchat messaging channel and bot to encourage digital adoption in a two-way chat.
We are guided by what our customer wants and needs and to support this we focus on bringing digital and people together to make every day easy, so our customer can do big things.
In our customers eyes you must be dependable and continue to deliver on the customer promise that is set, as this provides the starting foundations to allow you to continue to evolve digitally as customers want digital banking to become something that happens on their terms, when where and how they choose.
The next stage of digital banking is far from over with customers seeking how this becomes more accessible, more personalised and more secure than ever before. While digital banking will provide greater autonomy over our customer’s financial lives, all these improvements will see a greater number of customers become digitally active, as they will have their day-day finances literally in the palm of their hand.
