The law requires you to know your customers; how much more successful could you be if you understood your customers? If you understand them, perhaps well enough to anticipate their needs, you have a better chance of winning them over as lifelong customers than you do if you merely know their name and mailing address.
One survey tells us the average community bank will spend $1.5 million on technology in 2024. Seems like a lot of money until you learn that JP Morgan has 1,200 people on staff devoted entirely to developing the bank’s artificial intelligence capabilities. That may sound unbeatable, but Jack Henry Managing Director, Corporate Strategy Peter Glyman suggested at the recent Acquire or Be Acquired conference that community banks don’t need that kind of staffing. More than 1,200 fintechs are working on AI-enhanced banking solutions, he said, giving them access to the technology which can help them beat the competition, even the biggest players out there.
While the largest banks see AI as a strategy to turn every bank interaction into a self-service proposition, community banks can use it to foster deeper personal connections. AI, for example, will make it possible for bankers to offer more personalized financial planning; it will help bankers more effectively identify market segments for specific services, and AI can help bankers collect documents for customers in order to streamline the application process, greatly increasing the likelihood of funding more credit offerings.
Even if you are not exactly sure what your digital future will look like, AOBA speakers urged bankers to get started. Step No. 1 is drafting a data policy. One speaker, understanding the challenge this task poses in many shops, urged bankers to bring in a third party to help. Then, bankers can move forward by cleaning up their data, purging dead or dormant accounts, and moving toward that paperless office that used to be the stuff of science fiction. NCino CEO Pierre Naude said bankers have to put the infrastructure in place to make the most of the data they are collecting. “The trick is to collect the data and quickly get it into the hands of the people who can use it, like the frontline service reps,” he said.
A decade from now, the number of banks will be lower but it seems the banks that survive are going to be able to do a lot more, serve more people, and generate more stakeholder wealth.