For long, relationships with customers were a natural and easy duty for bankers: the client had a financial issue to deal with, he walked through the door of his bank branch where he was warmly welcomed by the bank teller or an advisor, and for the most fortunate of them, by the manager. Check deposit (that piece of paper used in the last century to pay off a debt), cash withdrawal, stock market orders … There were plenty of opportunities and it was easy for the banker to inquire about his client’s projects and offer services. “Digital revolution” swept away all that! First of all, the client was offered automated machines located outside the branch, and, even worse, the possibility to call a customer relationship center to perform basic operations by telephone. He was finally offered the whole range of “bank-it-yourself” via internet, at home or in the office at first, then at restaurant or on the street thanks to the smartphone which has today a preponderant role in his life and consumption habits.

But retail banking is not a consumer sector like any other. Food, cosmetics and fashion brands leaders reach their customers via medias with very well targeted and tailored slogans, and succeed in building loyalty and creating the need by offering new products or improving texture or packaging. Bankers do not have the same ability to induce such an interest or desire. Try to figure out clients queuing in front of a branch to be the first to subscribe a newly released savings product… This time has not yet arrived.

In this digital era, relationships between customers and banks become increasingly disembodied, utilitarian, transactional, and banking products and services are becoming simple convenience products. Some have understood this and thus got involved in the game: brokers, fintechs of all kinds, took advantage of it to reach the most profitable segments of the value chain, leaving to bankers the duty to offer their customers a complete, universal service (which often, according to them, should be provided free, even if it requires heavy and expensive infrastructures).

The final assault came with the advent of aggregators. The customer no longer even needs (at least apparently) to go through his bank branch to view his account and carry out transactions. The European directive on payment services (DSP2), which will come into force in 2018, requires banks to give a free access to any operator instructed by a client to all his banking data. In doing so, the regulator has just blown up one of the last wall behind which the banker could still shelter to maintain some form of close relationship with his client. With aggregators, a customer has virtually no reason to know in which bank his account has been opened. He will only pay attention to his Bankin ‘or Linxo interface, through which he will have an aggregated view of his financial assets, his consumption habits, and even promotional offers on a product or from a marketer …

Because of disintermediation and a lack of a real customer relationship, banks would inexorably be doomed to suffer, and therefore may even disappear. Aggregators have an ideal position to direct the client to a “partner”, to help him choose a savings, financing, or insurance offer, in line with a “one stop shopping” customer path.
Most banks have understood and seen the risk emerging from that paradigm shift. They decided to enter the race. They do so alone (in the case of Fiduceo’s acquisition by Boursorama in 2015, just like Société Générale and Crédit du Nord which developed their own aggregators) or by using white labelling technology platforms (for example, HSBC, Crédit Mutuel Arkéa, BforBank chose to use Linxo). Some insurers took advantage of this and expand the scope of their customer relationships beyond the subscription and sinister claims management; MAIF for example advertised in June the launch of Nestor, an aggregation platform that will offer its clients a wide range of financial services from key partners, and so did SwissLife with LaFinBox.

No one can predict who will be the biggest winners (and the main losers) of the coming war. However, we can bet that those who will be able to do so are aware of the following:

• Play ahead, make the right strategic and technological choices early,
• Provide value-added services: aggregators and use of financial data, analysis and advice, transaction, push offers, multi-brand loyalty program management …
• Work in open architecture and build bridges with different customer interactions: financial services, protection of goods and people, marketers, information and content providers
• Stay agile and “pivot” as many times as necessary

The challenge for banks is to play the right role in the customer’s life cycle through the aggregation of content, and to reestablish a close relationship with him (even a digital one).

[Automatically translated by Lingotek]