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Yes, You Can Innovate Your Digital Banking Platform Quickly and Efficiently. Here’s How.

At the heart of any digital banking platform is customer experience. The user wants their online or mobile banking experience to be fast, easy and intuitive — without worrying whether a call to contact center or visit a branch for support. 

However, banking platforms require constant change: new features are added or retired; the core iOS, Android or browser platforms are upgraded; marketing wants to promote certain products via in-app banners or messages. Such changes could become a nuisance not only for the user but also for the IT team tasked with pushing these upgrades.

The promise of innovation is that changes should appear subtle and natural within the app experience. Further, there should be no need for downtime or stress on the IT team to push those upgrades. That’s why Lumin Digital offers weekly upgrades that allow quick and constant innovation and reduce the risk of any outages or downtime that can lead to consumer distrust. 

Training Users to Trust Change

While there might be some initial friction when a user transitions from in-person to online to mobile, customers should eventually find the mobile or digital environment familiar to them. The interface should be consistent and intuitive, and should present clear, obvious choices.

Even though new features might be unfamiliar or confusing to use at first, they should become second-nature. For example, mobile check deposits require taking photos of the front and back of a check — a strange concept for many when it first became available at many larger banks. However, this feature now leads in consumer preference. According to a survey conducted by Statista, the most valuable feature of mobile banking apps was mobile check deposit. The lesson? If your platform is consistent and reliable without downtime as you make small changes and improvements, users may be more likely to adapt when you roll out new features, accepting technology rather than running from it.

Take the Stress off Your IT staff

With growing responsibilities and shrinking resources, IT teams are tasked with rolling out upgrades while providing routine maintenance of the institution’s systems. The ability of the IT team to deliver directly impacts user experience, as a mobile banking app that times out, delivers error messages, or is unavailable only serves to frustrate users. Worse, a sufficiently negative mobile banking experience could convince users to switch to a more nimble, technology-first provider. 

A continuously evolving, third-party cloud-native platform helps smaller banks reduce this threat, removing the need to take systems offline and reducing customer confusion and frustration. Credit unions and financial institutions need a partner that has invested extensively in automation and quality engineering to ensure that upgrades can be deployed quickly and reliably, without disruptions for customers and staff. A partner like Lumin Digital can take the headache out of converting legacy systems and remove the need to worry about legacy code ever again. 

Lean on Internal Awareness and Buy-in

Partnering with a digital banking platform provider like Lumin Digital that has years of experience working with credit unions does not simply benefit the IT team. The entire organization reaps the rewards as well. A non-functioning app will spur customers to call customer care, thereby putting significant, undue stress on a team that might not be aware of a current issue with the app. Further, it might affect the firm’s bottom line: if a customer is in the middle of a credit application and the app times out, the customer might simply decide to not re-apply once the app is back online.

This makes it all the more important to work with a partner who can help eliminate these issues. And if your team is hesitant to your digital transformation plans, reminding them that errors, inaccessibility and downtime within your institution’s current mobile app adds to their stress may help you garner the internal support needed to make innovation possible.

Most importantly, don’t piece the transformation process together. Lumin Digital can help you from start to finish and continue to support your team with weekly upgrades and zero downtime. We want to empower credit unions to deliver a seamless, continuous experience to not only customers but also employees, as all can benefit from upgrades without friction or disruption. 

Jake Wengroff writes about technology and financial services. A former technology reporter for CBS Radio, Jake covers such topics as security, mobility, e-commerce, and IoT.

Sources

Statista – Most valuable feature on primary bank’s mobile app in the United States in 2021