Loveless Digitalization - eBanking Part 1

In the "Loveless Digitalization" series I briefly present a case of digital transformation that fails to deliver on the potential of possibilities and outline how a better product or process could look like.

The problem:

I love e-banking. I always hated waiting in line, talking to a clerk about financial matters amidst a crowd of strangers and only during limited business hours and only on certain days. However, e-banking to this day is often poorly implemented from a user perspective, probably due to a mix of a lack of imagination and effort on the side of the banks, technical difficulties like legacy systems running on software written in languages that barely anyone knows anymore and outdated regulations.

This becomes particularly evident in the following use-case: imagine you just moved and go through the list of organizations and people that should know your new address. That list includes your bank. So, you log on to your e-banking and search the portal for a possibility to change the address. If you're lucky, you find such an option. I did in my case and already started revising my previously rather negative view of the digital maturity of the financial institution. But after clicking on the "Change address" button, my suspicions were confirmed...

I was told that I'd have to download a form and send it in via mail. Upon downloading the PDF it turned out that it wasn't even properly formatted for entering values on the computer, making me print out an empty form that I filled out with a pen while silently swearing.

A typical case of not thinking through a process from start to finish and a lack of data integration.

A better way:

Changing your address is something most of us do at least once in our life so it is something that a bank should expect it's customers will be doing at some point of the relationship. In the end, it is nothing more than changing a value in the customer data - assuming you are not moving your country as well, which could trigger some regulatory activities. That a process that started in the digital world is being moved back to the analogue world is usually a sign that you're missing out on the potential of thoughtful digital transformation. Possibly there are legal restrictions for financial institutions to consider but assuming that that's not the case, a better way would be for the customer to enter the new address directly in the e-banking portal. This either automatically updates the customer data in the bank records or at the least transmits the new data to the relationship manager or another person at the bank in digital form in a secure way. Many banks allow you to communicate with them electronically, so why not allow a customer to notify you in a digital way as well? Thinking through the process from beginning to end would have led to a much better user experience and help the financial institution to match its digital ambitions from marketing brochures with reality...