The retail banking market has come out of the financial crisis with a new outlook on how to engage new customers and how to retain and cross sell others. The shift to omni-channel, multi-channel whatever is something that has been happening for a while now but its largely focused on self service and operational efficiency. There were leading vendors like my old employer Intuit/Digital Insight who focused on growth and retention, cross sell and engagement through innovations in digital banking; but those were largely incremental changes. Sure, we tried to integrate personal financial management into the mix but it didn’t catch on. What we learned was that people just didn’t want to know how bad it was in terms of budgeting and categorization.
What is happening now as we come out of the financial crisis is a focus on sales, on-boarding and integrating wealth management or private banking into the general retail banking offerings. Two key trends I’m seeing are big banks bringing their brokerage practice to the branches and a shift to integrated omni-channel on-boarding workflows that leverage both technology and a sales culture.