Supporting Fintech Growth Requires A Modern Approach to CX

The finance industry has come a long way since the retail bank on “Main Street” was where customers experienced most of their major financial transactions. Financial technology – better known as fintech – has created an environment where innovative technology and software has been applied to financial services.

This ranges from complete retail and business banking services through to apps that just offer a single, very specific, service. What really connects most fintech services is that they have been designed around the needs of a modern highly-connected customer. Customer-centricity is built-in from the start as these services have all been created to be simple and accessible.

But despite the innovative appearance, fintech brands have many of the same challenges faced by the traditional finance companies. If they offer a financial service then they will need to satisfy regulatory compliance procedures and any service involving finance needs to be even more secure than most other types of service.

But fintech has additional challenges. Customer expectations are often far higher because customers expect these services to be easy to use and highly responsive to customer needs. Slow service might be an expectation with your traditional retail bank, but not with that exciting new app you just downloaded.

Fintech brands often experience periods of rapid growth, where the service is mentioned or recommended online and a large number of new customers come onboard. This can be a particularly difficult challenge because customer expectations are already higher than those for traditional finance brands.

Fintech growth is moving from a period of hypergrowth, where a few of them achieved enormous growth, but many failed, into what McKinsey calls a ‘new era of value creation’ where the focus is on profitable growth that is sustainable.

This McKinsey report states that in 2023, publicly traded fintechs represented a market capitalization of $550 billion – double the amount in 2019. During the same period, there were more than 272 fintech unicorns, with a combined valuation of $936 billion, this compared to just 39 firms valued at $1 billion or more five years ago.

This is the challenge. More and more fintech brands want to achieve this sustainable growth and head into the unicorn territory, but this needs a very strong focus on the customer relationship. Customer expectations are always high for innovative fintech services, so how do you ensure that your customers can be onboarded and served with the level of experience they expect?

Moving beyond a traditional approach to customer service is essential. Fintech customers are ready to embrace innovation and new ideas – sometimes they are embracing entire virtual economies that have no track record in traditional banks. They are actively engaging with financial services on their mobile device, rather than expecting any personal interaction with a representative of their bank.

These services use digital channels and so the approach to designing a modern customer experience also has to be upgraded. Customers have elevated expectations of service quality from fintech brands, they expect 24/7 service because they are engaging with the service on their phone, and they don’t expect to ever see a message like ‘You are a valuable customer, but we are experiencing long delays at present.’

How can a modern fintech design a fantastic customer experience that meets all these requirements?

1. Gen AI Support: offer an AI chatbot trained on the products, so it should be able to handle a large amount of product-related questions. Also add AI support for the human agents working in customer service, so they can focus entirely on supporting customers and not managing manual processes – like writing up call notes. Use AI across your entire customer experience design to improve automated and human interactions.
2. AI Personalization: fintech customers are sophisticated consumers who expect a higher level of service than that offered by traditional financial service companies. They don’t expect to just have access to an account, they expect advice and help on how to achieve their financial goals – they want support. Ensure you use the knowledge of how your customers interact with the system to offer them options and insight.
3. Humans Remain In The Loop: customers that are comfortable using apps to manage their cash are highly likely to be comfortable with your AI-powered support channel, but sometimes only a human will be able to help. Ensure that you have knowledgeable agents available on channels that are reflective of how the customer engages with the company – for instance, offer in-app support rather than just offering a phone number.

Following these basic principles will ensure that your fintech customer experience will resolve customer questions quickly and accurately.

Movate has extensive fintech experience and our team can supply case studies and material demonstrating that our approach to designing a fintech customer experience is aligned with the needs of the fintech community.

One of our clients is a global leader in payment services technology. They faced challenges such as long delays when customers needed help, difficult supporting customers out of business hours, and few actionable insights into customer behavior.

Our team worked with the client to build a Gen AI strategy, including support for agents, that saw 24% of customer interactions immediately handled by the AI. Customer interactions were handled 20% faster. Customer cases that needed investigation dropped by 38%.

Designing a fantastic customer experience for fintech brands is an area where our approach works very differently to traditional customer experience specialists. We can help to design and build the AI, we can offer highly flexible Gig CX, and we can design a core customer service team that can operate 24/7.

This flexibility and innovative design is exactly what fintech brands need from a partner.

For more information on Movate banking and financial service solutions, please click here.

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