Mobility triggers banking and insurance transformation
Enables anytime anywhere access to financial services
Information in the financial world has never been so dynamic and fluid in nature as it is today. It traverses through multiple channels and undergoes rapid rearrangements, necessitating a structured process framework to manage this dynamism. As the nexus of four strong forces - Mobile, Social, Cloud and Analytics hits the global financial industry, enterprises need to quickly realign their critical processes and ensure real-time collaboration between all internal and external stakeholders.
Mobility offers a myriad of opportunities for financial institutions to provide on-time services to their customer's on-the-fly. Organizations must now think beyond customized information services and offer mobile-enabled transactional services to create superior customer experiences. Customer-facing mobile applications drive significant sales effectiveness in remote locations, while augmenting brand value through enhanced customer services in urban regions. Mobile technology empowers field executives with information and tools for smarter decision making, improving their productivity by several notches. It has opened many new sales and service channels for bankers as well as insurers by bringing the entire spectrum of financial services to the customer's doorstep. Physical presence through branch offices no longer defines the market territory for the new age financial institution.
Organizations must therefore leverage this platform to transform their core operational systems and foster process innovation. Mobility's unique industry applications have the potential to propel the financial industry to new heights through customer centricity and operational productivity.
Highlighted below are some of its key applications for the banking and insurance industry:-
Point of Sale and Customer On-boarding - Customer acquisition is the most engaging and one of most critical stages of the sales lifecycle in the financial sector. Execution agility through a robust process framework at this stage can help banks and insurance firms gain brand value and market competitiveness. Mobility offers financial enterprises a reliable and flexible solution that empowers their field agents with tools to conduct customer need analysis, to educate potential customers, and to influence customer decision making while delivering an unmatched customer experience. Mobility allows first time right capture of customer documents and seamless transfer of information to core banking systems for real-time processing.
Customer Self Service - The emergence of advanced mobile devices and their phenomenal penetration across various segments of society has created unprecedented pressures on banks and insurers to render smart, mobile-enabled customer services. Through mobile technology they can offer convenient self-service tools and communication platforms to gain competitive advantage while simplifying processes, and reducing administrative costs. Mobile technology allows customers to access their account details, keep track of payment dates, check service request status, and file claims ‘on the fly'.
Mobile Sales Force Productivity - Filed sales executives are the first point of contact with customers and often make or break the deal for them. Still, for many organizations field service operations are the last frontier where enterprise information systems, workforce monitoring solutions and productivity tools stop making an effect.
Mobile technology can lead to significant time savings and improved productivity for a firm's mobile field force by facilitating seamless interactions between the field-sales staff, their offices, and their clients. With improved accuracy in information capture, it brings down the operational expenses and creates process efficiency. Organizations can use mobile technology across all stages of sales lifecycle from lead management to customer on-boarding, to customer servicing.
Process Management - Mobility offers a flexible platform for banks and insurers to optimize critical processes across the value chain. For instance, it enables instant policy issuance for insurance customers, reducing the process time from a few weeks to a few minutes. It also streamlines the claims management process by allowing claims adjusters to capture and access critical case related information, while they are on the move. For banks, mobility can play a key role in managing ‘float money' efficiently by extending collections/recoveries process to a tablet/smart phone.
Dealing with sensitive customer information in the mobile space creates many data-centric security issues for financial organizations. These issues can be tackled through a robust technology platform that enables secure communication between the non-branch customer touch points and the core banking system.
Newgen Software has made a pioneering foray into Mobile Capture technology to bridge the gap between service delivery timelines and customer expectations. Its innovative, Enterprise Mobility Platform, ZapIn, is built on this revolutionary technology enabling field executives to capture information and initiate its processing in real time at the first point of customer contact. It is a highly secure platform, as it encrypts data while storing on the device as well as transferring it over the network. ZapIn can bring tangible business benefits across multiple domains including Banking, Insurance, Telecom, and Logistics amongst others.
The article is contributed by Virender Jeet, senior VP, Technology, Newgen Software