Control Your Mobile Roadmap

Talk to any executive at a financial institution and they’ll tell you they have a mobile strategy, whether it’s implemented or not. Innovative banks dipped their toes in the mobile waters with remote deposit capture (RDC). While successful for marketing campaigns, back end users and customers found several issues ranging from image quality to, not so surprising, human error in rekeying data. Having worked with financial service organizations for more than 20 years, the questions, fears, and challenges are always the same. Will this really improve how we engage with and acquire customers? What if customers don’t find it intuitive to use? Or worse yet, what if it doesn’t work and customers leave for the competition?

As more banks rolled out RDC, customers have become tolerant when poor image quality or system errors resulted in the occasional need to resend, visit the branch or call customer service to verify information. This minimal inconvenience is still considered better than the alternative of going to the branch for every check deposit. However, now that consumers are more comfortable with using their mobile devices to conduct banking transactions, they have greater expectations for a better experience and more services. The bar is being raised and customer expectations are increasing.

Using Mobile for Revenue Generating Opportunities

Mobile bill pay and customer onboarding are two services that bank executives should have on their mobile roadmaps. Imagine the potential of enabling customers to add a new payee by taking a picture of their bill of any size and type and sending it through the mobile portal that automatically populates back-end systems of record and completes the transaction with just a couple taps on the screen. Likewise, consider the possibilities of acquiring new customers or upselling products via a mobile device simply by capturing their driver’s license and having the business rules in place to determine an approval within seconds. Putting this power in the palm of customers’ hands, at the point of origination, nearly eliminates human intervention throughout a business process, while optimizing the customer experience. The opportunity for banks to add these mobile capabilities seems a natural progression, but it’s not so easy to execute.

Who’s in Control of Your Mobile Roadmap?

Unfortunately, the simple RDC app is a standalone solution and is not extensible for other mobile use cases. As banks explore additional mobile capture services, a justifiable concern is being tethered to a single vendor to integrate data and systems for more functionality. Unlike the rigid and closed solutions mostly offered today, financial institutions need a single, open platform that can support a variety of mobile capabilities and can scale to support additional offerings when ready. Banks desire to create a process one time with a toolkit that allows for deployment of a common look and feel across all customer interaction channels for centralized management, customer engagement and control. A major advantage to an open platform is it allows banks to easily integrate with existing IT infrastructure and applications. Designed with an open and configurable application programming interface (API), the bank can integrate and validate against any system or data source to develop new mobile capture services in just weeks. Costs are more contained and disruptions to current services are averted. Banks can truly own and control their mobile roadmap.

When a bank can create a process once and deploy it across all customer interaction channels – mobile, email, fax, local branch – they save time, money and gain a competitive advantage by getting to market faster. This is best accomplished with a single, open platform. Furthermore, a thorough review of foundational capabilities, such as image quality, mobile capture, business process management, data integration and analytics, is essential to meet customer and IT expectations.

If a bank has already invested in an RDC app and is finding difficulty in seeing new, mobile revenue-generating opportunities come to fruition in less than three months, or see common questions, fears and challenges creeping in, then it’s time they reclaim their mobile roadmap.

Drew Hyatt is Senior Vice President of Mobile Applications for Kofax