Banking Not Meeting Basic Consumer Expectations

According to consumers worldwide, financial institutions excel at leveraging digital technology to meet convenience and access needs of customers, but fall short in becoming trusted advisors and moving beyond transactional convenience to a more contextual engagement.

By Jim Marous, Co-Publisher of The Financial Brand and Publisher of the Digital Banking Report

The inaugural FIS Consumer Banking PACE Index™ was created to provide an index based on 18 banking service attributes thought to be essential to developing relevance and trust with banking consumers. The index was designed to help financial institutions better understand both their customers’ key expectations and the delivery performance against these expectations.

The index was built based on surveys conducted in nine countries with individuals who have a checking/current account or its equivalent with a financial institution. Results of the study show that, worldwide, while consumers say financial institutions excel at providing digital access and convenience, 77 percent of consumers do not believe banking meets expectations in basic banking areas such as fair and transparent pricing.

This suggests that while the financial industry as a whole is successfully delivering digital access solutions, there are significant opportunities to build a stronger foundation for consumer relationships. This can be achieved by more fully leveraging online, mobile and social platforms to integrate with consumers’ lives through insight-driven alerts, advisory services, planning tools and more.

“New providers and non-traditional financial institutions continue to make inroads, particularly amongst younger generations, who studies show will soon make up the majority of bank revenues,” said Anthony Jabbour, CEVP, Integrated Financial Solutions, FIS. “With these challengers poised to grab customers, financial institutions have the opportunity to lead with their strengths and re-define advisory services. Consumers value the banking relationship and banks have a significant opportunity to be viewed as more than a vehicle for transactional convenience, but rather a true focal point of consumers’ financial lives.”

Where Banking Is Falling Short of Expectations

The attributes in the FIS PACE Index are clustered in four ascending bands of banking service relevance and quality. Level 1 attributes are recognized as essential, foundational requirements in today’s consumer banking environment (e.g., safety, security, fairness, reliability, transparency). Level 2 attributes are critical for successfully matching the current and future styles of banking competition required to attain and deepen customer relationships (e.g., being connected, omnichannel access, digital payments).

The index was generated in the following manner:

• The performance score for each attribute statement is subtracted from its importance score to yield a positive or negative figure (performance gap). For example, the global importance score for Safety was 85 and the global performance score was 81, resulting in a performance gap of -4.
• The index is compiled by weighting gaps between importance and performance for all attribute statements according to their importance, compiling the weighted gap scores across all statements and then centering those aggregated scores around 100 in order to create an index.
• An index of 100 indicates that performance matches importance overall.
• Indices below 100 indicate shortfalls on at least one dimension.

Given the number of recent high-profile security breaches, it’s not surprising that safety and security top the list of what’s important to banked consumers. Unlike many other attributes, which vary in importance according to population segment, safety and security are universal concerns. Delivering on those attributes therefore represents the price of basic entry for being in the banking business.

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