The Digital Customer

“Who is the future digital customer?”

The question has several possible answers. For some bankers, the future digital cus­tomer may be at home chat­ting on social media or playing a comput­er game. “Generation Z will be coming into the workforce over the next few years. They are going to have radically differ­ent expectations and behaviours that will redefine the baseline for the industry,” says Brett King, founder and CEO, Moven, a potentially disruptive mobile financial services provider.

They will need financial services, but how can banks attract them? King adds: “Getting them into a branch to open an account is just not going to hap­pen. Plan for that, and you’re just going to be churning legacy customers.”

Technology reaches Generation Z just as it also potentially gives us access to communities of the as-yet unbanked around the globe. And for both groups, mobile, digital technology is likely to de­fine the platform for delivering financial services going forward. Future digital cus­tomers, whether they’re concentrated at home or spread across the globe, will have one thing in common: mobile access to the internet. “Mobile technology enables people to access financial resources far more effectively,” says Akhtar Badshah, chief catalyst, Catalytic Innovators Group.

FinTech Growth

How do we deliver financial services to the next billion? Treat them as we would a new market, with its distinct customs, behaviours, attitudes, needs. Be prepared to adapt our own behaviour and thinking but not necessarily to innovate. Discuss­ing millennials, de Jong says: “Most of the innovation has happened already. Most of the value propositions were innovated around five years ago, and only a very few have been created just in the past two years.” The wheel has already been invented. So what do we do now? Now is the time for growth. Many of the new fintech companies are still rela­tively small on a global scale.

Some of what we learn from millen­nials can be applied to the unbanked, even if the resulting services have to be adapted for lower-spec technology and/ or a more challenging operating environ­ment. Millennials don’t carry cash. They pay online; their cellphones interact with point-of-sale systems for face-to-face transactions; their use of Airbnb and Uber suggests the evolution of effectively cashless “sharing systems”.