Financial services organizations are currently facing unprecedented public and government scrutiny. For many of them, this involves an uphill struggle to re-establish economic strength and customer trust. Additionally, in this era of telephone and internet banking, the distance between institutions and customers has increased to the point where discerning customers are now defining customer service as a crucial element in their choice of financial institution. Besides operating in a tightly regulated sector, they must contend with customer and market-related barriers that make it difficult to stand out and excel.
Finance Industry Challenges and How to Addresses Them
While these challenges slow down some professionals, others see them as an opportunity, with winners turning financial services marketing challenges into a competitive advantage. By mastering and overcoming these challenges, they race ahead of competitors, effectively reshaping the financial services competitive landscape and securing a place in a highly disruptive future.
Regulatory Marketing Challenges
The financial services industry is one of the most tightly regulated industries in the world. Breaking even one of the dozens of federal, state, and sometimes local rules can result in lawsuits, hefty fines, and reputational damage.
Solution
Use a professionally deployed digital asset management system (DAM) with inbuilt compliance controls. Since the most significant challenge with compliance control is human error, DAMs add a layer of automated accountability, ensuring all assets deployed meet compliance thresholds.
Brand Consistency
Maintaining fluency across multiple parts of a financial marketing campaign is no small feat. While this challenge is not unique to the financial services industry, financial institutions must still get it right to win in their market.
Solution
Integrate all brand concepts into a unified branding strategy. Translate the strategy into concise and codified brand guidelines. Encode branding guidelines into tech-enabled organization-wide conditional workflows.
Exceeding Consumer Expectations
Consumers continue to expect a lot from their financial institutions. Many want more personalized services from their financial providers.
Solution
Make relationship building the focus to build trust and establish brand loyalty among potential customers. One way to build relationships across your customer base is through content marketing
Agile FinTech Startups
One reason FinTechs are making such aggressive inroads is they understand customers better than traditional firms. For example, they know that Millennials trust technology more than face-to-face or “brick-and-mortar” experiences.
Solution
To start, identify and implement optimizations to the digital customer experience to reduce friction and enhance conversions. For example, digitize all paperwork and create portal to attract new customers, retain existing ones, and withstand the impact of FinTech startups.
Creating an attractive company culture
LinkedIn’s Workplace Culture report indicates 70% of US professionals would forego working at a leading company if the culture was bad. Culture matters today from both the employer and employee perspective.
Solution
Start by taking an honest look at how things currently are. Talking to staff or conducting a satisfaction survey will give you a clear picture of what’s working well and any areas of concern that you really need to focus on. Don’t try to address all issues at once. Prioritize them and take steps to tackle the top cultural issues.
