5 Tried-and-True Banking Practices to Take Into the Digital Age

While the white marble pillars of traditional financial organizations may have come down long ago, a number of banking practices and principles still shouldn’t get left behind. With digital innovations making banking continually more convenient on any mobile device or computer, even digital financial institutions would be wise to keep some of these evergreen practices in place and apply them in a modern way. From knowing your end-users to keeping their money safe, here are five tried-and-true banking practices to take into the digital age.

1. Know Your End-User

More than just greeting a user by name, financial institutions that know what the user needs before they even have to ask to provide more value to the banking experience. By leveraging user data and user behavior, financial institutions can deliver actionable alerts to their users, which leads to more engagement and better financial outcomes. Research from Epsilon shows that users want and expect personalized experiences and that they are most comfortable with providing personal data when they can manage and control the resulting experiences. The research also shows that financial incentives — such as tailored discounts and offers — are the greatest motivators for providing such data.

2. Provide Speedy Service

While some digital financial institutions are replacing the brick-and-mortar presence altogether, leaving the ATM as the only physical touchpoint, end-users should still be able to talk to someone if they need to, and when they need to. In a sense, digital innovation makes this all the more plausible with 24-hour customer service representatives or artificial intelligence (AI) chatbots filling in where traditional tellers cannot. Lumin Digital uses a native cloud platform to innovate at lightning speed and with minimal risk, so your users always get the latest and greatest version of the software, while time-consuming upgrades and traditional business hours become a thing of the past.

3. Promote Community

In the case of credit unions, the community is a crucial component to their business model — but even digital financial institutions can create the feeling of community for users in the online space. After all, they are interacting with their financial providers through digital channels three times as frequently as they are in-branch. Beyond anticipating user needs and remaining accessible either on the phone or via chatbots, banks and credit unions should be accessible, active, and engaged on social media as well. From Facebook posts dispensing financial advice to tweets about new banking products, there are a lot of ways to use social media channels to engage your banking community online.

4. Educate the End-User

Digital tools like Lumin Digital can also be used to promote personalized financial wellness tips to users on a regular basis. In the past, a user may have made an appointment with a financial advisor to ask about account setup or various products, but digital innovation means that education is an ongoing and convenient process, no appointment necessary. Even more, financial wellness relates directly to overall health, with one survey showing that financial concerns were the biggest reason Americans lose sleep. Beyond having a resource center with educational materials and dispensing financial advice via social media, financial institutions should use technology like Lumin Digital’s cloud-based software to offer personalized money insights and relevant tips and resources according to a user’s behavior. The result is a more- educated — and potentially better-rested — end user.

5. Protect the End-User

Banks and credit unions are wise to remember that trust is their foundation. From fraud protection to seamless digital experiences, financial institutions must be up to speed on security measures to prove to their users that their safety is a top priority. After all, research from FICO shows that users fear banking fraud more than death or terrorist attacks. With a tool like Lumin Digital, banks and credit unions can use cloud-based technology to detect suspicious account activity and encryption to protect data. These active defenses keep end-users and their data safe at all hours of the day.

Learn more about how Lumin Digital is modernizing tried-and-true banking practices in the digital age.

Erica Garza is an author and essayist from Los Angeles. Her writing has appeared in TIME, Health, Glamour, Good Housekeeping, Women’s Health and VICE.

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