From siloed to seamless: How digital banking transformations unite every corner of the bank

Banks face a critical challenge: their front, middle, and back offices often operate in a siloed fashion, undermining their ability to implement a banking transformation that allows them to serve customers effectively. Meanwhile, customer demand for personalized banking has never been higher. Research from the Harris Poll found that 74% of banking customers across generations want more personal banking experiences. Banking leaders cite creating a personalized, seamless branch experience as their second highest priority, after regulatory compliance and risk management.

Banks must implement workflow solutions that unify and modernize their systems to deliver on these mission-critical customer expectations.

The impact of fragmented banking systems

Maintaining disparate systems isn’t just a technology headache for the IT team. Siloed bank infrastructure creates operational difficulties that lead to opportunity costs. Front office employees don’t always have ready access to the customer data they need to provide personalized service. The middle office struggles to ensure compliance and properly manage risk when information is fragmented across teams. Back office staff may have trouble accurately recording and documenting transactions without a unified view of the data.

According to the Capgemini Retail World Banking Report 2024, bank employees spend 70% of their time on operational activities, leaving only 30% for customer interactions. Only 9% of client onboarding team time is allocated to customer interaction. Legacy systems and fragmented databases exacerbate inefficiencies, hampering customer service. Without sufficient access to data, employees struggle to respond quickly, leading to prolonged transactions and dissatisfied customers.

Effective approaches to digitalization in banking

Banks must prioritize digital transformation that connects every area of their organization if they are to compete and thrive in today’s retail banking industry. As the Capgemini report found, 70% of bank CXOs plan on increasing digital transformation investment by up to 10%. The advisory firm notes that banks are enhancing their data management capabilities and modernizing legacy systems first and foremost, migrating core functions to the cloud where necessary to establish an agile, cost-effective foundation for future digitalization in banking.

This modernization strategy enables banks to eliminate operational silos and allow employees across all offices by secure digital methods to access the same data — what’s known as a single source of truth. This way, banking professionals can make faster, better-informed decisions. Unified insights allow front office staff to provide a higher standard of customer care, for example, by implementing analytics tools to unearth valuable customer insights. Banks can also tap workflow solutions like robotic process automation (RPA), artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) to enhance middle-office risk management and back-office processing.

Mobile-first tools such as secure mobile messaging solutions build on these benefits by allowing teams from the front, middle and back offices to collaborate in real time securely. Through secure mobile access, bank employees can safely access these integrated systems and data from anywhere, whether greeting a customer who has just entered the branch or arriving at a client site for an important presentation.

Secure mobile access also facilitates further customer data collection that can enable even more refined and impactful personalization, enhancing future opportunities to earn customer satisfaction. A front office employee might accomplish this by inviting customers to share information about their tastes and preferences on a tablet while completing an account setup for them at a local branch, making it possible to provide them with more tailored services later on.

Banking transformation enables a unified experience

When banks digitally transform, uniting data and teams alike, they can meet customer expectations for a great experience. For example, a front office employee can receive an alert on their wearable or mobile device when a customer has arrived, allowing them to greet them at the entrance by name and confirm the reason for their visit. Then, the employee can provide them with personalized recommendations on a tablet.

Middle office teams flag potential compliance issues right away, using secure mobile communication tools to alert their colleagues for timely follow-up. As back-office process automation lifts the burden of manual data management processes, banking professionals can focus on higher-value initiatives. Ultimately, by boosting employee productivity, banking transformation makes it possible to deliver continuous customer experience improvements.

In uniting their operations through digital transformation, banks can create an environment where employees can be more productive and effective, providing personalized experiences that earn customer satisfaction and secure a competitive advantage.

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