Digital Transformation in the Banking Industry
The banking industry is leading the way regarding digital transformation. Leading financial institutions like Bank of America and AIG are changing the way the banking industry operates as they strive to reduce costs, deliver better experiences in and outside the branch, and meet millennials where they are: mobile devices. Now businesses in finance and banking are tasked with achieving better internal processes, customer satisfaction and convenience for the customer. As a genuinely service-based offering, banks cannot afford to get left behind concerning technology.
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Banking and Finance Challenges
Speaking to Jim Cramer recently Brian Moynihan, CEO of Bank of America, highlighted perfectly the many challenges and trends that have been happening in the industry over the past five years. Banks are more focused on providing better convenience for the customer to increase their satisfaction with the company. Better processes need to be adopted to ensure lower operating costs and a better cost structure that can plan for a bright future for the bank. Banks have two challenges to deal with, like most other industries, and these are keeping customers happy while improving their financials to provide shareholders with growth.
The Opportunity
In the last 10 years, bank branches have transitioned from an operational cost, where people would do day to day operations, to a place where customers only attend to gain specialist steering and attention. Bank workers are no longer tellers and customer service officials but relationship managers who strive to provide the best service to their customers.
The customer’s expectation is to only attend a branch to get quality counselling and purchase financial products. Everything else, from filing forms, to signing contracts, to requesting loans and mortgages, to checking on the day to day finances, can be done online, either on web or mobile platforms.
Bank of America is a perfect example of this change in position as they have:
- Reduced the number of ATMs they service thanks to card, mobile and contactless technologies
- Increased customer satisfaction
- Went from 6,100 to 4,300 branches in the USA
- Achieved an efficiency ratio of 48%, thus increasing their cost structure
PDF Technology enables digital transformation for banks
Just like banks identified the need to move from people taking cash from an ATM to pay for goods, allowing customers to pay for goods directly with their credit or debit cards, so did they see the need to move from paper to digital documentation. The move from paper receipts in ATMs, to PDF statements in browsers is only the tip of the iceberg regarding where PDF comes into the mix for banking.
PDF Forms
When applying for a loan or overdraft, applicants must answer many questions about their job and personal life. Having smart PDF forms, hosted in banking apps or on company websites containing conditional logic, means that once an applicant answers one question the following questions can be tailored so that no unnecessary questions get asked. This allows for a more efficient, more convenient form filling process for both parties, saving time and adding to the positive customer experience that leading banks look to achieve.
Digital Signatures
Often processes are slowed down due to a backlog in sign off. This is true for banks among other industries. With PDF technology, customers can digitally sign PDFs documents and forms using their digital devices, which is then the underwriter can countersign digitally, leaving a 100% compliant audit trail which took a fraction of the time to complete thanks to Foxit’s PDF SDK technology.
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Digital Archiving
Archiving used to be a costly endeavor for banks due to the price of storage. With cloud solutions, however, storage has become cheaper if you move your paper documents to a digital format. Using Foxit’s PDF and OCR technology we can not only bring your archive online but make it 100% searchable and PDF/A compliant so that your files are not only future proofed and safe, but also optimized to take as little storage space as possible.
Multi-Platform
Brian Moynihan, CEO of Bank of America mentioned that the company has 35 million digital users who visit their website actively on a digital device, be it on a desktop or mobile, while emphasizing the importance of meeting their customer where they are, wherever that may be. Of these users, 25 million are active mobile users. This staggeringly huge figure shows the importance of having a service offering available over all devices and easily accessible on of them. With Foxit’s reflow technology, viewing PDF documents and forms in a consistent manner is possible in mobile devices. Reflow identifies the screen in use and fits the document to it so that scrolling from left to right is not needed, and images get resized. Our technology is 100% device agnostic, making for a great viewing experience for customers.
Join leading banks in using PDF SDK
The banking and financial industry focuses on increasing customer satisfaction and lower costs. For the past ten years, we have seen rapid growth in the market in line with these aims. PDF technology can help the industry achieve their goals tenfold. It can streamline processes, add value to businesses and automate workflows to allow staff to spend time on more important tasks like becoming specialized in building relationships with customers. Talk to us to discover how banks like AIG and Bank of America, long-time customers of ours, have been able to adopt our technology and to create a frictionless banking experience for their customers worldwide.
Ready? Start a trial today or contact one of our representatives in your area.