Envisioning the future of banking convenience
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Mr. Tilan Wijeyesekera
“Technology has made the world a better place by shaping everything, from day to day operations to the lifestyle we lead, technology is redefining convenience in whatever we do. As countries uplift their digital and physical infrastructure to embrace new technology, a significant focus is also put in place by financial institutions to enact new technology to serve its stakeholders better,” a top banking professional has said.
“Whilst the rise of FinTech’s and innovative technology has propelled banking convenience to the next level, we at Seylan Bank believe that banks who provide tailored customer convenience along with human support are likely to thrive in the future,” said Tilan Wijeyesekera, DGM- Retail Banking of Seylan Bank PLC, in a media release.
Explaining further, Mr. Wijeyesekera said: “If we look at the demographics of Sri Lanka, we see two broad clusters of people where one group is tech savvy and are able to grasp the ever evolving innovations into their life, whilst the other is not as familiar with the latest technology and are dependent on legacy systems to fulfil their daily banking needs. At our bank, we have strongly focused on enabling convenience to both of these segments by constantly embracing new technology to offer the latest banking facilities to the new age customers as well as implementing innovative techniques to make traditional banking more efficient and user friendly for the non tech savvy consumers.”
Elaborating on how Seylan Bank has evolved over the years to serve its stakeholders better, Mr. Wijeyesekera noted: “In the 90s, customer convenience was about obtaining a loan or a product from a financial institution. During this era, banks who offered the most number of ATMs or branches were lauded as the ones that offered greater convenience. However, today’s banking is entirely different, with the rise of new technology and change in consumer behaviour, we are witnessing disruptive technology enabling customers to engage with their banks through multiple touchpoints to carry our various lifestyle and financial related transactions. Further, we are also aware of the emergence of diverse financial lifestyle services, facilitating customer transactions in basic commerce in the form of shopping online or booking an overseas trip to channelling and paying for doctors’ appointment and many more.”
“Understanding this rapid transformation, we developed our medium to long term digital banking road map and have taken swift measures to improve our digital banking propositions, thus enabling our consumers to be able to interact with the bank through any channel they choose, such as the web, mobile, other combined physical and digital touch points including CDM’s and social media platforms,” Mr. Wijeyesekera added.
Explaining the key challenges in the digital banking space, Mr. Wijeyesekera said that “One major element that is paramount when it comes to digital banking is security. With the rise of new technology, convenience has become simpler and tends to alter a consumer’s perception on security and vice versa, where having high security authentications lead to a poor experience. At Seylan, we do our best to strike a balance to this explicably synched formula. Further, our IT and digital banking team, consisting of highly competent industry experts, strive to come up with innovative solutions that will further improve our customers’ User Experience (UX) and e-banking platforms whilst ensuring the highest level of security with practical multi factor authentication.”
Remarking on the Retail and Digital Banking, Marketing, Sales and Service quality team’s effort towards increasing convenience, Mr. Wijeyesekera said: “Social and technological transformation has had a significant impact on banking and is empowering us to make better use of a wealth of data which is available to us. Key tools such as data warehouses and BI systems have forced banks to adopt strategic marketing and product management practices. These include offering extended services, cross bundling and modification of products, cross and up selling, customisation, entry into new markets and emphasising electronic banking.”
Mr. Wijeyesekera added that the future of banking requires balance. “While consumers can handle menial, day-to-day financial tasks from their phones, they still prefer the opportunity for a face-to-face conversation when making an important financial decision. The growth of technology will continue to enhance customer experiences but the organisations who are going to forge ahead are the ones that understand the need to balance the adoption of technology with the importance of human interaction and service delivery.”