Whenever I participated in a retail bank’s strategic planning, one goal always showed up. Growing revenue by cross selling additional products to existing customers. This is a laudable goal but is also the one which often fails to gain traction or is executed with heavy focus on branch or direct marketing channel.
What about digital, you ask? Every bank has all the product application forms online- isn’t that sufficient for cross sell? Unfortunately, the answer is no. Cross selling is all about 1) getting the timing right and 2) convincing the customer that the bank he or she knows is a better deal than other options. This is where a great Account Opening Platform can drive growth across products.
Traditional cross sell process often does not kick off until after the customer is onboarded on the first product. Let’s say, someone is opening a checking account online. Most banks will start bombarding the customer with other product offers via direct mail and emails few months after the account opening.
The perfect time to tell the customer what additional product he or she qualifies for, is before the first account opening is complete. This is when the customer is most engaged. It sounds easy and intuitive, why isn’t everyone doing it? Because in most banks, the products are often managed in silos, account opening systems across products are separate, with no interconnectivity.
Customers are not opposed to cross sell, they are merely looking for ease and convenience. Now that no one is going to branches, Digital Account Opening (DAO) with integrated cross selling is key. DAO should be designed as a platform that works across all of the bank’s consumer products from deposit to personal loan to auto loan to credit card. Front end APIs can drive customer experience. Often the same customer information (address, DOB, social security no., tel. no.) can be used to qualify the applicant for multiple products.
The secret sauce is in the platform design which must be able to handle separate underwriting criteria for each product without repetitive questionnaire and multiple hits to credit and other information sources. This means an auto loan applicant gets a credit card offer with specific line and APR without re-keying personal info. A checking account applicant gets a personal loan offer with terms and monthly payment before he or she completes the checking account application process.
The future is in connecting the banking cores to a modern account opening platform. A platform, which can seamlessly pull myriad of disparate external and internal information and create a single customer facing experience.
It’s time to ditch fragmented application processing systems built to mimic paper-based process. Imagine an experience when a customer can take a selfie, scan the driver’s license, authenticate selfie with driver’s license picture, verify the phone, answer a few questions and open couple of bank accounts while sipping coffee.
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