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Stretching Financial Inclusion

Financial Inclusion (FI) is often seen as outreach of banking to underserved and unbanked regions and people.  To me this is limiting the potential of FI.  I see FI as a vehicle for innovation with the potential to disrupt customer engagement model if used correctly, riding on technology advancement. 
The inclusivity will be in selling convenience. The convenience is in
offering products and services that are attractive and popular. Thus ‘including’
more ways to engage existing customers, adding new customers for a greater
wallet share and of course leading to business growth, the top 5 game winners 

Have a great mobile banking App:

We are the app generation, living and breathing apps. It is a appy world.  Banks can be appy as well. Have a cool banking app container where a customer can store frequently accessed products / services.  Provide ‘favorites’ to quickly
access last 3 transaction types. How to make it secure? Well, have a touch bio
metric authentication to open the app.  Whenthe customer registers for the service, record the IMEI number of the phone. This can be used for remote locking when reported lost or missing.  

Channel agnostic unified user experience:

This is the key to attract new customers. Unified user experience across all channels is a big draw.  We have experienced several times the screens look very different in online banking, shrunk while on mobile banking and weird on tablets. Well make it similar and simple, Majority of the customers like simple banking, easy to understand and easier to transact.  Have the most popular products easily
accessible.  

Functionality:

Dive into data analytics and fish out the 5 most popular products / services, offer these with a unifieduser experience with free or discounted fees when a customer is on self-servicechannel.  Remember if a customer needs anything complicated, she will get in touch with a financial advisor.   

Product selling

Next what!  It is important that a customer is constantly engaged. This can only happen if each interaction has something new to offer.  Constant and consistent discovery is what drives a conversation. The loyalty of a customer is driven on similarlines laced with trust. Offer products and services suggesting what other’s
bought combined with what is accessed in the current transaction.  Bundle the products, price it competitively.  It will sell.    

 Gamification:

The gaming app; this is catching up in a big way. Who does not like to play around?  This is a green area for innovation. Create a product and throw it open to customers for playing around, with help files.  Offer loyalty points for time
spent on the gaming app.  At the end of the game have an option to buy the product.  Encourage comments from users, mine, analyse, interpret information to improve the product.  Launch in any social media.  

Financial inclusion is all about encouraging a customer to include more and more products and services in their portfolio reaching out to them through technology.

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