2023 is a new opportunity for financial institutions to consider their growth plans and align on a strategy that favors sensible, merit-based growth over expensive, grow-at-all-costs marketing budgets and clumsy approaches to customer acquisition.
Specifically, focusing on increasing your operational efficiency, delivering on customer experience to drive organic growth, scaling with the support of partnerships, and assessing the efficacy of your technology to drive customer experience can all help grow in a meaningful and sustainable way in 2023 and beyond.
Identify Operational Efficiencies
Closely analyze your operations to find new ways of improvement. Specifically, think about the way you structure your staff, and what belongs in-house versus what could be better served with a partnership.
In particular, small and medium financial institutions should focus on their IT and software development staff. For many organizations, ongoing partnerships, rather than in-house staff, can better serve them from a cost-to-value perspective. Partnering with both IT and software development support can help you reduce your overhead, find a budget that is sustainable and incentivizes growth, and meets your operational and innovation goals.
Compete on Customer Experience
Bloated marketing budgets often serve as a band-aid for lack of organic growth. Similarly, lack of organic growth is often due to underperforming customer experience metrics. The most successful brands and organizations are able to grow by delivering a great experience, creating passionate promoters and continuing to delight new customers.
This year, make sure your financial institution is focused on your customer experience performance metrics. In doing so, you’ll be able to blow away the competition and increase your market share in a way that acquires new customers inexpensively, sees a low churn rate and creates a positive feedback loop.
Utilize Partnerships
Partnerships are a great way to “bake in” innovation into your everyday operations. In order to utilize a FinTech organization’s technology, most financial institutions should ensure their customer information and data is in an accessible API, where third party organizations can utilize that customer data to provide meaningful tools, information and personalized offerings based on customer data.
Scrutinize Your Technology
Every financial institution should perform a meaningful audit of its technology. In particular, every feature in every piece of technology should have an identifiable and measurable impact on the customer experience.
Too often, financial institutions get in the habit of creating technology for the sake of checking a box, without attributing the performance of that technology to a customer experience metric. The end consequence is a bloated IT budget without an impact on customer satisfaction. By streamlining your tech overhead, you can reassign dollars and resources to features that are improving the lives of your customers.
