Trust and Transparency in Banking – Part 2

Trust on a brand is built over years. However, it is lost with one poor customer experience and with continuous such poor experiences, the news spreads far and wide, leading to devastating effects. For many financial institutions, such loss in trust by the customers has led to them not only being charged millions of dollars in fines, but also, millions in remediation, and worst of them all, public censure, and reputation loss!

Since 1999, Harris Poll has been quantifying the public reputation of organisations in the US, across the industries, and have found that 80% of the respondents to their survey, have always rated “lying or misrepresenting facts about a product or service”, as the top reason affecting reputation. In the latest findings, there is only 4 financial services organisations in the US in the top 50 – most favourable of them is perched at 13, others are at 17, 45 and 47. Other top reasons for the fall of reputation and trust in a financial institution are “lack of fee transparency”, “providing biased advice for my needs”, “misusing my data”.

A survey by Ernst & Young, suggests that the rise of self-financial management tools propagated digitally and the rise of non-banks and neo banks, has also contributed to lack of trust in the traditional financial institutions. With the increasing dependence and ease of use of digital solutions, the trust in technology is increasing, leading to increasing trust in the non-banks and neo banks, as they fundamentally ride on technology to reach the customers and provide them solutions.

Research firm Forrester highlights the relationship among trust, advocacy, loyalty and future purchase intent in financial services. The research says, “Customer advocacy — the extent to which a firm’s customers believe it does what’s best for them, not just what’s best for its own bottom line (in other words, TRUST) — is a top predictor of customer retention and growth. US financial services customers who rate their firms highest on customer advocacy are most likely to consider those firms for future purchases.”

The bottom line is that like any other relationship, customers base trust as the cornerstone of their relationship with their financial institution. Let’s look at how banks can potentially embrace trust as the fulcrum of all their policy making and decisioning.

To drive trust as the pivot for all organisation decisions, processes, customer centricity must be the centre stage conversation. It is a cultural decision that the board and the management have to drive at all levels, with the right incentives all throughout the organisation. The most consequential way to trust building is by motivating and rewarding the right behaviour. Right from the front-end staff to the CEO to the Board, has to find and do the right thing for their customers. The senior management must become the ambassadors of customer centricity, and trust and that must drive all decision making. With the focus on earning customer’s trust, by building a culture of customer centricity, one of the largest banks in Australia, recently announced an investment of $50 million towards a coaching, education and accreditation program for each one of the 34,000 of the bank staff. While announcing the program, the CEO of the bank remarked that their customers expect their bank to know them and get behind them with products and services to help them prosper. As a bank, they will meet those needs by doing the right thing for their customers and getting the basics right – every time.

For a financial institution, delivering complete transparency in product and service features and fees is a key driver towards building trust with customers. Research has proven positive correlation between fee transparency and customer advocacy. If customers don’t find their financial institution to be transparent on its fees, they are less likely to recommend them to others, making banks lose opportunities to cross/up sell and future business. Driving complete transparency on fees and product and service features is a prerequisite for banks to own the role of a trusted advisor. A centralised product catalogue and a centralised pricing engine sitting on top of all the product systems, that drives product orchestration at the channels and automates the pricing process for the financial institutions can go a long way in enabling product features and fees transparency.

Having a streamlined and seamless approach to customer touch points is crucial to drive customer experience and build trust. Such infrastructure is key to enabling improvements in efficiency, accuracy, and service. Imagine a customer starting a loan application on the digital channel, however, must visit the branch to finish the application with assistance. Moreover, as the branch and the digital channels are disjointed, the customer must restart the application, with some data/information loss through the movement across the channels. Or a customer sees a special offer on internet banking channel, however, he does not see that offer on the mobile app. Such poor experiences can be rooted out by a centralised platform that enables data and information flow between the channels. To drive operational excellence, back end systems must be integrated with the touch points to enable easy orchestration of product and service information and fees. Such ease with operations will propel transparency across the processes, enhanced self-servicing and even empower the financial institution staff to direct the customer to right choices.

Privacy and protection of customer data is another key factor in enhancing trust. With the widespread use of digital, data assumes tremendous significance. Thus, its misuse grows. And with this the need for data protection against cybercrimes, fraud, misconduct, etc, swells significantly. Financial Institutions need to have the right mechanisms to not only protect customer data and keep it private and confidential, but also protect against, say credit card fraud, payment fraud, or similar crimes. With the increasing demand for Open Banking requirements/commitments across the globe, managing and protecting the customer data will be even more critical. Clear responsibility of holding and managing such data is going to be paramount. It is not only about having the necessary infrastructure and process in place, but also about a proactive process and a customer centric approach. The staff needs to be regularly sensitised against such misconduct and misuse of data. The country and regional privacy laws – the likes of GDPR in the EU, The Privacy Act 1988 in Australia, The Data Protection Act 2018 in the UK and similar, need to be operationalised with regular checks and monitoring in place. Financial Institutions should look at building additional controls into the products and services that restricts misuse of any customer data.

For a typical financial institution working as different sub-businesses within the single institution, having a “single source of truth” for product and services or fees, or even customer data, can be a pipe dream. However, there are institutions, who have achieved this with varying degrees of success, and continuing the path. Unless the front-line staff or the customer service representative does not have the holistic picture of the customer, it is always going to be different for him to serve the customer appropriately and “do the right thing.” And if one asks the customer to wait and come back a few days later, the battle is already lost. This is where integrating data across silos and empowering staff to deliver the right product or service, is going to enhance the customer experience and trust.

With the growing use of digitalisation, and the experiences from the other industries, customers expect the similar superior experiences from their financial institutions. Fallout from the current Covid-19 situation and ensuing spurt in use of everything digital, the trust in tech and digital is growing at a pace like never before. This will put financial institutions at the crossroads, where they not only have to shore up their balance sheet in this uncertain environment, but also invest in ways to grow their customer’s trust in them.

Trust and Transparency in Banking – Part 1

“I explained I’m a gambler...they can clearly see that I’ve got a gambling problem because of the transactions I’ve been making, and I don’t understand why they keep offering me more money.”

- a witness in the Royal Commission into Misconduct in Banking, Superannuation and Financial Services Industry (in Australia)

For last few years, Australian Banking has been rocked by the Royal Commission’s investigation into misconduct in the financial services industry. During the hearings, various institutions have acknowledged varying amounts of negligence or misconduct in their customer dealings. In the last year’s report, all the banks and financial services institutions were reprimanded and fined to varying tunes by the Royal Commission. The remediation processes and risk management processes arising from these findings are still keeping these organisations busy, with each year multi-millions kept aside to remediate affected customers and arrest the brand erosion somewhat.

Similar enquiries into misconduct have happened in the UK as well in recent years. And the UK FCA has institutionalised a conduct risk framework. All major banks in the UK were fined in recent years for either not proper giving commensurate advice, lack of fee / charge transparency, or mis-selling. Each of these financial institutions had to go through multi-million pound of redressal changes and some had to face the dreaded public censure.

Similar problems of conduct risk have been seen in other parts of the globe. With the rise in digital transactions, multiple party involvement in a transaction like payment; financial crime, conduct risk has grown multi fold across the banks. Other examples of conduct risk in a bank could be as simple as misinforming about products/fees, charging fees for no service, serving wrong product/service, administration errors pertaining to customer data, improper advice not commensurate with the customer’s situation, charging incorrect fee or interest, improper complaints handling, and many more. All of these have been found to be areas of misconduct in the Australian Royal Commission assessment (referred above), and the FCA assessment paper in the UK. In fact, the last Banking Standards Board (BSB) report on the culture in the UK Financial Institutions, highlights small but significant declines in the areas of conduct risk, which arise mainly due to lack of transparency and controls in the systems and processes. In the long run, slowly this leads to erosion of trust with the banking industry at large.

Trust is essential to relationships in all facets of life – personal, professional, financial. We have long expected financial institutions to do the right thing for their customers. Banks consider trust a strategic imperative for them, as it is a key indicator of advocacy and future business. And if it is eroded, the impact can be devastating. But trust is often found wanting in today’s world, as can be seen from the conduct risk lens described above. As the consumer trust in the fintech and big tech grows, and as these tech companies spread their wings far and wide into world of financial services, it will be a even more important for the financial institutions to be more trust worthy, to not only shore up future business, but to protect the existing business as well.

Studies have found that the lack of transparency and controls in the systems and processes can be found in anywhere in the bank – right from product design to approval to sales process, post sales servicing, to all-encompassing culture and governance at the bank. The lack of controls or the lacuna thereof, at any stage during the customer lifecycle, can contribute to conduct risk and eventual loss of trust in the institution.

Lets us look at trust from the financial institution customer’s lens. For this customer, trust starts at the very fundamental ask from these institutions – protecting money and identity (or customer data). Fulfilling this trust imperative, may not ease competition, however, not meeting these expectations can surely lead to damaging returns. Another trust imperative is the “promises” made by the financial institution to the customer. These could simply be – “mortgage application will be settled in 3 days” or “there is no annual fees applicable for a credit card”. Such promises are made all throughout the customer lifecycle with the financial institution and not meeting such promises frustrates the customers and regularly not meeting these promises leads to loss of trust and eventually leads to them switching over to more competent options in the marketplace. Another imperative for trust is the “long term relationship building” – wherein, banks are considered for the financial advice and well-being of their customers. This is where banks will consistently deliver products and services which are fair and transparent and meet the long-term financial well-being of the customer.

All these trust imperatives are needed by the financial institution to compete successfully in the market place. All of these together would make one’s brand and the brand promise are what the financial institution must live for. It also offers the most compelling differentiation from the competition.

Negative interest rates explained

Even as the world slowly “reopens” amid record low interest rate environment almost across the globe, there are calls from the leading economists like in Australia, or from the US President, urging the respective central banks to move the negative interest rates. The Fed Chair, Jerome Powell, disagrees, and seems so is the RBA Governor, Philip Lowe, as well, given that RBA held fort and continued with the ultra-low interest rates (0.25%) in Australia, in their policy announcement last week.

Well, ultra-low or negative interest rates are not new for the world. Nordics, parts of EU and Japan has seen negative interest rates for some years now. Experience from these countries says, though, these were imagined and hoped for to be short term booster shots for the economy, however, they turned out to be sticky. And these economies have seen negative interest rates for more than 4 years now. We shall come back to them again. Lets first understand what negative interest rates mean or why are we seeing increasing calls for central banks to bring interest rates to the negative territory.

In layman terms, one can say, negative interest rates would mean, one is paid to borrow money from banks, or one is charged to keep money with the banks. Essentially, you are instigating people to borrow more and spend more and trigger the ripple effects of such spending to support the slowing economy. All thanks to Covid-19, as the world economy falls into the recessionary zone, negative interest rate is being strongly proposed as a tool to stimulate growth the world over.

As the central banks mull over this, negative interest rates would essentially mean, banks would be charged money to maintain excess liquidity in the system. Thus, disincentivising them to maintain excess deposits, and forcing them to lend more money.

As a banking customer, one’s cost of money becomes very cheap. One can borrow money at very low rates and may even be paid to borrow money. In Denmark, where negative interest rates have prevailed for a while now, upon taking a mortgage, a bank doesn’t pay the cash directly to the customer, instead, adjusts the mortgage amount outstanding each month by more than what the customer has paid back. Thereby, shortening the overall mortgage payback period for the customer. Such low rate mortgages can hopefully trigger a housing boom and have a spiralling effect on the economy, as one would then consume various other products and services associated with the purchase of the house.

Borrowers with existing debts are encouraged to consolidate their debts outstanding at a much lower rate, allowing them to save money, which can then be spent on other consumption items, which can support the overall economy.

Savers are discouraged to save with the banks. They either earn no interest on savings or are charged a fee to save. Thereby, encouraging them to spend more. Banks in Denmark, Switzerland, Sweden, Japan, where negative interest rates have prevailed for some years now, give no interest to their customers who save with them. However, they do charge a fee for savings beyond a certain threshold.

Negative interest rates are bad for the savers. With no returns on the savings with the banks, and add to it the inflation (however, low it is), one is losing money by keeping money with the bank. If such a situation prevails, it is likely to change consumer behaviour in the long run, as one has traditionally been encouraged to save. This is likely to build a purely consumption driven society, as one is incentivised to spend and not save up. This may even affect the risk averse investors, as they may end up gravitating towards risky assets in search of returns, which are not available in traditional savings anymore. Senior Citizens, who are encouraged to keep their money in savings and enjoy the sunset years of their life through the steady interest income, will be another segment of customers who will be adversely affected. This is also likely to have long term effects on the retirement planning of individuals and thus investment strategies of retirement and pension funds.

Besides, the changing consumer behaviour, there are other challenges for banks as well. Negative rates would affect the bank bottom lines significantly. They will have to find ways to increase margins to maintain profitability. Prolonged ultra-low to negative interest rates, can affect the overall health of the banks and financial institutions and could eventually lead to them holding off lending and thereby affecting the economy adversely. With depositors shying away from keeping their savings with the banks, this may even lead to hoarding of cash, heard of during the Great Depression.

With changing customer behaviour, banks will have to change their product and service offerings to the customer. Innovative product offerings, for e.g. interest earnings on deposits tied to certain cash flows by the customer, can be a good start. Or simply tying interest earnings to investment products, can be options that can be looked at. Personalisation of the product or offer to the customer, depending on the customer’s individual circumstance, would be required.

Supported by some learnings from Japan, EU, one can safely say, that cheap money does not always spur business expansion and economic activity. It just takes cost of money out of equation. Having said this, economists around the world are urging central banks to go for them. And whether they will spur the world economy or not, is to be seen.