Every time your customers click on a page link, swipe on your app, or purchase an item from their phone, they engage with your brand. Each online action builds a sum of impressions, and those interactions create a Digital Customer Experience (DCX). The better your users’ digital experience, the more likely they will return to and endorse your brand. It is the companies that create meaningful, personalized connections with their target demographics that will earn repeat business and brand loyalty, generating rapid growth. Recent data proves the importance of DCX when it comes to retaining priority market share. Customers will continue to demand seamless access via digital channels, and the companies that offer a hassle-free experience will earn the largest share of user traffic. Finding ways to improve your DCX is of critical importance.

• Digital customer service interactions will increase by 40% in 2021 – Forrester
• 40% of customer service organizations will earn massive profits because of their ability to offer a high level of digital customer engagement – Gartner
• By 2023, enterprises that can cultivate empathy will outperform those that don’t by 40% – IDC

What’s Trending in Digital Customer Experience

The focus on DCX has pushed companies to be creative with how their online footprint establishes an impression with users. Innovation in the domain of DCX has uncovered new avenues, and these trends are redefining how people interact with online applications. Technology continues to remain a key enabler, with brands leveraging advanced technologies to create these exceptional digital experiences.

Brands will create superior multi-touch, omnichannel customer journeys

Customers connect with brands mainly through online and digital channels, whether on social media, the website, various online marketplaces, or the virtual e-commerce storefront. The more touchpoints a customer has access to (with cohesive messaging), the better the engagement. Brands need to move away from siloed interactions and create smoother omnichannel customer journeys to meet the evolving demands of their target audience.

Hyper-personalization in customer engagement will rule

80% of consumers are more likely to make a purchase when the brand messaging and communication is personalized. Brands need to capitalize on personalized, targeted messaging to create rich customer experiences. The coming years will witness an increased focus on facilitating meaningful customer interactions through online messaging and social channels.

Predictive analytics and advanced data technologies will be dominant

Companies today have access to the largest volume of customer data than ever before. Data science will continue to flourish, with advanced technologies like Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, and predictive analytics employed to uncover new opportunities based on recorded customer behavior. Data technologies will evolve in the areas of real-time customer feedback, customer requirement predictions, and prevention of customer churn.

Heightened focus on data privacy and security

Customers are highly conscious about the information they share with brands, and data privacy and security prevail as dominant trends in the customer experience paradigm. Companies will focus on implementing tighter security practices and offer customers more control over what data they are willing to share on digital and online channels.

Advanced digital platforms will fuel superior customer experiences

A growing shift towards super personalized, real-time customer interactions is accelerating adoption of advanced digital platforms by brands to manage their digital customer experiences. Instead of manually building and deploying applications (a time-consuming and potentially costly affair), digital platforms with readymade and cloud-native apps facilitate reliable, consistent, and cohesive digital experiences across multiple online touchpoints.

AWS Digital Customer Experience (DCX) Competency

Brands recognize the importance of digital platforms to deliver superior customer experiences, and Amazon Web Services (AWS) leads the race in this segment. Through a complete suite of advanced customer service solutions, AWS helps brands deliver more consistent experiences to customers across multiple devices and online channels. AWS is one of the most comprehensive cloud platforms, and their DCX Competency provides the tools brands need to engage prospects with the best online experiences.

The DCX Competency platform is a network of partner solutions and services that you can seamlessly add to your digital channels. Each service integrates with your digital business and helps create meaningful user experiences for different elements of your online applications, web pages, or content. AWS DCX Competency categorizes its partner solutions in four streams, each of which targets different aspects of the customer acquisition and retention life cycle.

AWS DCX Competency – Key Technology Tracks

Content Management: Content is one of the primary ways a customer engages with a brand. Blogs, e-books, tutorials, videos, podcasts, or other useful content can help generate curiosity, present your thought leadership, help your customers navigate a problem, reveal a potential customer, and ultimately offer customized experiences. You can leverage the AWS DCX Competency to build personalized content, manage and present it online, as well as connect analytics to uncover high-performing messaging.

Marketing Automation: AWS offers several solutions that improve your marketing strategies for a frictionless customer journey. For example, you can introduce efficient and effective marketing campaigns or personal video tutorials that generate engagement and build new prospects. Imagine automated user journeys that promote product cross-selling across your digital platforms. Each automated tool helps increase total customer retention while lowering costs.

Digital Commerce: E-commerce vendors need well-managed supply chains to succeed. The better your supply chain, the more enjoyable an experience you can provide your customers. AWS DCX offers tools for managing online shopping carts, recommendation software, order entry apps, product indexing, and payment gateways. These applications make the entire online shopping experience simple and easy for your customers, while providing you with greater visibility and business efficiency.

Customer 360: AWS DCX offers a wide range of solutions for real-time tracking and compilation of customer data. Customers are continually telling you how they want to engage and what they are looking for through their interactions with your digital channel. These analytics apps empower you to take the seemingly endless volumes of customer behavior data and turn them into actionable insights you can use to improve your decision making and further enhance your customer experiences.

Case Study: How this Fintech Leverages the AWS DCX Competency to Deliver Superior Digital Customer Experiences

One of the leading fintech companies in the US utilizes part of the AWS DCX Competency stack to create exceptional, consistent, and personalized customer experiences across their digital platforms. These technologies support the client’s ideology of providing banking solutions that are “simple, secure, and offered at speed while exceeding customer expectations”.

This fintech firm primarily leverages the AWS DCX partner solutions listed below to meet its core business objectives.

Let’s dive into how these solutions help brands create personalized, consistent customer experiences across their digital / online channels.

BRAZE for superior customer engagement and retention

Braze is a customer engagement platform that collects data from different online channels, uses that data to define custom audiences, and then suggests personalized messaging to connect with each audience group. It integrates with other applications and presents an overview of your marketing campaigns. You can also use Braze to automate custom-built email marketing campaigns and create specific customer communication around discounts and offers. Below are some of the key features of Braze:

AMPLITUDE for user behavior insights

Amplitude helps measure the effectiveness of personalized marketing materials. It utilizes real-time data to study user behaviors and patterns. The program can also segment audiences based on conversion rates. Amplitude leverages Machine Learning for better data analytics. Below are some of the key features of Amplitude:

LOOKER for customer intelligence insights

Looker provides enterprise-level insights for better business intelligence. The service, built in a multi-cloud environment, unifies enterprise data applications and embedded analytics into a single app. From there, it presents visualizations to help locate inefficiencies or bottlenecks within your digital customer experience. Below are some of the key features of Looker:

SEGMENT for user analytics aggregation

Segment loads each customer interaction into a singular profile. With such an accurate understanding of users, you can create or optimize your marketing materials to meet the real-time demands of each user for a more personalized experience, and better customer engagement. Below are some of the key features of Segment:

TEALIUM for mobile data management

Tealium helps brands meet customers on the digital medium they prefer (their smartphones), while collecting user interaction data that can be compiled and analyzed to help brands expand or enhance their mobile service offerings. Below are some of the key features of Tealium:

The AWS DCX Competency can help organizations enrich their customer experiences across multiple digital channels and increase overall business effectiveness to achieve their business goals. Emtec Digital is proud to be a trusted technology partner to global enterprises – helping them deploy several of their AWS applications and solution sets. If you wish to create more personalized online experiences for your customers, Emtec Digital can help. Contact us today!

Financial institutions across the world are in a race towards digitization and application innovation. Consumers demand online convenience, and cloud-based environments allow financial institutions to meet and surpass that demand. The disruptive growth of technology in finance is most pronounced within risk management. Big data and the enrichment of behavior insights through Machine Learning (ML) has completely redefined how institutions approach risk profiling. Financial services is a highly regulated industry, and new developments in IT and ML data modeling offer flexible, accurate, and agile solutions to mitigate monetary risk and ensure compliance.

AI/ML (The programming language of AI) streamlines and improves the old rules-based (and often faulty) algorithms built by humans. For fintech firms, this means comprehensive personas (that are far more accurate for risk profiling) can be developed based on customer actions. AI/ML is even predictive, capable of making future determinations based on past customer actions while processing extensive global rule sets. AI/ML is proving to be a gamechanger in cloud-based financial IT infrastructures.

• 80% of business executives report finding value from an AI deployment
• AI will deliver $13 Trillion in global economic activity by 2030, a 16% increase in GDP
• AI can facilitate a 20% immediate reduction in default rates

AI/ML facilitates new levels of personalization and actionable insight into customer data and presents the most innovative way for fintech companies to minimize risk.

Altering the risk management game

Banks and financial institutions using cloud-native environments leverage AI/ML to automate risk management from the vast amounts of customer data collected from multiple heterogenous sources. Machine Learning has impacted these scoring models and how they present monetary risk:

• Credit Risk Profiling – Machine Learning can make detailed risk assessments of a potential borrower with enriched insights. This information is far more reliable than the standard scoring of traditional credit bureaus.
• Market Risk Assessment – Bringing together disparate and automated data at scale means intelligent reporting on macro market stability can be devised, helping you make informed decisions for your financial service.
• Operational Risk Management – Integrating business workflows with Machine Learning can provide substantial efficiencies and cost savings. One bank utilized ML models to eliminate 35,000 investigative hours by locating and deleting 95% of its anti-money laundering (AML) false positives.
• Fraud Detection –AI/ML algorithms can prevent future fraudulent transactions based on historical attack patterns. The more samples of fraudulent activity your AI engine can draw from, the better it can scale and protect against illegitimate requests.
• Cyber Security –Artificial Intelligence can analyze millions of login attempts and potential credential stuffing, as well as secure individual cloud components to minimize data loss and threat exposure in a breach, thereby protecting sensitive customer data.
• Underwriting Risk Management – AI/ML uses Optical Character Recognition, language processing, and text extraction to sift through masses of data for underwriters. Previous approvals and rejections collated by ML engines can help insurers quantify their organization’s overall risk appetite. Forecasting models then assist in determining if a client risk profile fits within the close-ratio threshold.
• Compliance – Financial institutions must adhere to several industry regulations, which may require significant resources and additional cost. AI can help parse long and complicated compliance documentation. For example, AI algorithms can calculate Basel II and Basel III capital ratios between millions of outgoing and incoming daily transactions. This ensures lending is within pre-defined government limits and guarantees lower risk and continued compliance.

Benefits of AI/ML powered risk profiling

Risk profiling powered by AI/ML can transform financial services, helping fintech firms minimize risk. In turn, this provides several key benefits.

• Operational Improvements – AI-powered data categorization can clean extensive data strings at a rate faster than humans can. It is cost-effective to deploy, and as it can handle large components of micro-segments, your ability to scale is drastically increased.
• Loss Prevention – AI/ML-powered data engines have no subconscious bias and can glean numerous risk factors from millions of user transactions, a useful tool in loan servicing. Detailed personas and customer insights will decrease your total potential losses or defaults. AI decreases total loss expenditure for services by 23%.¹
• Increased Data Accuracy – AI reduces the potential for data errors, reduces false positives, and improves your risk evaluations.
• Customer Trust – Offering cybersecurity, advanced digital applications, and convenient services builds customer engagement and overall trust in fintech services.

Harnessing the power of AWS and AI/ML

AWS provides a suite of application tools that leverage AI/ML to extract valuable customer insights in real time. The many AI-powered digital solutions offered by AWS allow fintech firms to instantly integrate several AI-based programs that facilitate risk management, helping achieve increased transparency and efficiency.

Here are just a few examples of fintech firms who have built on AWS:

• The Financial Industry Regulatory Authority (FINRA) built its platform on AWS and achieved 30% cost savings²
• DBS Bank forecasted a 90% reduction in grid infrastructure costs after migrating to an AWS installation of Murex’s risk management platform³

The AWS Financial Services Competency Partners Network

Migration to cloud-based environments is not an easy undertaking, which is why AWS has a dedicated partner network for support. A trusted AWS technology partner like Bridgenext (former Emtec Digital) can do the heavy lifting for you; helping implement the AWS AI/ML-powered applications you need to better serve your customers. Take advantage of the various cloud-based partner offerings that help identify, model, and assess risk without the hassle of technical build-outs. With the help of AI/ML-powered AWS services such as predictive analytics, intelligent document analysis, character recognition, and language processing, Bridgenext helps fintech companies manage and mitigate risk.

Bridgenext serves as a trusted partner to fintech firms like Varo Bank. With our help, Varo Bank now extracts and filters customer data utilizing advanced AI/ML algorithms for deeper customer insights. Contact us to learn how you can take advantage of AWS AI/ML services.

References

¹towardsdatascience.com/the-growing-impact-of-ai-in-financial-services-six-examples-da386c0301b2

²www.finextra.com/newsarticle/34107/the-old-rules-no-longer-apply-risk-management-and-regulatory-reporting-in-the-cloud

³www.finextra.com/newsarticle/34107/the-old-rules-no-longer-apply-risk-management-and-regulatory-reporting-in-the-cloud

The cloud-based architecture has become the de facto platform of digital innovation for financial technology services.

Fintech services have redefined the way consumers bank today. From mobile payments, to investment apps, to online-only banks, the “as-a-service” model is at the forefront of digital innovation. The global market for cloud-based Software-as-a-service was set to exceed 157 Billion in 2020¹, and there are now 10,605 fintech start-ups² in the United States alone. Financial institutions are in a race to evolve out of legacy systems and into updated software models.

However, an entire migration into the as-a-service model is an all-consuming task. Most banks do not have the infrastructure or know-how to build tech stacks that can support the wide variety of functionality that digitally savvy customers desire. Plus, it is extremely time intensive and cost prohibitive to implement each individual digital service in house. Welcome to the era of banking platforms — one-stop-shops that can facilitate a host of financial software products. With cloud-based banking platforms, Fintech firms are reaching many more consumers via online channels, while digitizing their financial operations. As technology continues to mature, cloud-based banking platforms will become the standard.

The banking platform that has grown to become the most prevalent is Amazon Web Services (AWS). AWS’s ability to build and scale computing applications fits perfectly with the disruptive programs Fintech firms want to employ. Fintech is not held back by monolithic structures, and companies can quickly adopt the cutting-edge innovation of cloud-based hosting that AWS offers. With its enterprise capabilities (a 40 billion dollar run rate)³, ready-use security integrations, enhanced data processing, and lower Capex cost for scaling services, AWS is the ideal platform infrastructure for fintech businesses.

AWS and Fintech – a winning partnership

When selecting a banking platform, you are looking for expansive service functionality, without the hassle of creating in-house technology stacks. Financial services need robust digital solutions that allow you to keep up with the fast pace of digital innovation, while staying secure and keeping migration costs low. To that end, AWS offers several key benefits.

Security and Compliance

Cloud-based infrastructure helps companies publicly share information and services on a network (the whole concept of open banking). But that brings with it a whole host of security and compliance issues. Consumers who expect easy online access to their financial services also expect that their data will be kept safe — not to mention the series of regulations enacted by various governments worldwide.

AWS already has built-in compliance with PCI-DSS, HIPAA/HITECH, FedRAMP, GDPR, FIPS 140-2, and NIST 800-171. Plus, AWS has one-click cloud security tools, and it can integrate with third-party security APIs. Fintech firms can save a massive amount of time and resources by leveraging AWS’s readymade security and compliance architecture. Built-in compliance and a host of security integrations makes it easy for Fintech to scale without service interruptions.

Enfuce uses Amazon Elastic Block Store and Cloud Watch to enable seamless failovers — they now maintain a 99% uptime

Transaction Data

Rich insights gleaned from transactional data is a big reason why fintech companies can develop services that create better user trust and engagement. Enriched data stores and deciphers vast amounts of information beyond standard card transactions, helping create enhanced customer profiles. Fintech leverages these clear and categorized reports to determine client behavior. This in-depth understanding of your clientele gives you insights you can act upon. From improved risk management to better deployment of differentiated software services, transaction data drastically increases customer service opportunities. As only 9%⁴ of the world’s major banks are monetizing their payment data, those that capitalize on this opportunity will capture a bigger market share.

AWS provides several APIs within its platform architecture to create enriched data insights. Amazon Kinesis has real-time data processing, AWS Lambda cleans and categorizes data fields, and Amazon Relational Database Service can generate usable graphs.

AWS boasts that it can increase your data enrichment reporting by 27% compared to in-house builds, and it helped Fintech Monzo handle over 1 billion of transactions throughout the UK.

Ability to Scale Customer Service

Most fintech and financial services are B2C, which means that bringing services to market and scaling them to meet consumer demand is the benchmark of success. Cloud-based banking platforms have the necessary infrastructure to facilitate these personalized services. Open banking has brought entirely new customer service avenues; the financial institutions that can test, create, and scale those methods of communication will drive digital transformation (and enjoy rapid growth).

Not every cloud-based platform can handle the workload a financial institution may demand. Latency or service disruption can cause immense amounts of user friction, so virtual operating systems with hybrid setups need additional integrations to balance high traffic. Without the infrastructure in place to scale, the growth of your fintech may suffer. Scalable solutions lead to a hassle-free and frictionless user experience, helping drive consumer engagement. AWS has an auto-scaling feature to ensure performance during on-peak periods. AWS also features outposts that bring APIs and services into any virtual data center, so you can provide the services your customers want with low latency, backed by Amazon’s enterprise support.

Varo Bank successfully migrated their mobile application in eight weeks onto a cloud-based banking platform and shifted 1 million subscribers in the following three months.

Support for DevOps

DevOps is a crucial part of building and scaling a financial service, and the automation and resource allocation of Amazon CodeDeploy gives you the ability to streamline most engineering options. Amazon also brings siloed operations together with AWS Identify so that all stakeholders can support DevOps at the granular level. Leveraging AWS’s development tools helps increase workflows and team efficiency.

Deployable Microservices Architecture

AWS’s service-oriented architecture was the basis of microservices, and it delivers some of the best componentization—far better than any monolithic structures. Services can communicate easily between APIs, and each microservice can be implemented by DevOps teams as needed, helping increase speed to market, scalability, and faster product updates.

Technology fuels service diversification in fintech

Financial services firms that implement the application solutions offered by AWS can create new ways to communicate and engage with customers. Customers demand digital access to their finances, and the firms that meet that demand and offer better levels of service will enjoy increased customer satisfaction and retention.

Leveraging technology to create differentiated products and services

Digital lending, access to cryptocurrency, mobile payments, bill analyzers, card controls, and budgeting apps all offer levels of customer service that standard institutions cannot compete with. AWS allows Fintech to build and deploy these services to reach a broader audience.

Data Enrichment

By enriching the data collected via AWS, Fintech companies can quantify customer experience through their spend transactions and market a variety of pertinent services to high-priority clients based on this high-level data.

Data Science and Machine Learning

Rule-based systems of data collection are time-consuming and prone to error. Though it might take more time to implement, Machine Learning can increase the speed at which data is enriched and cleaned, enabling predictive services based on the collected information. This data can then be categorized to build better services with AI-driven insights.

Data Lake Solutions

AWS facilitates the storage of structured and unstructured data at scale. With that capability, companies can develop new analytics from log files, data strings, and even social media data stored in the data lake. Firms that can identify, analyze, and act upon their undefined data will be much better positioned to offer the personalized and unique services that their customers crave.

AWS drives digital transformation, but also complexity

Cloud-based platforms help firms harness the fast pace of innovation. However, they also bring a level of complexity magnified by stringent regulatory and compliance mandates (especially as security and privacy needs increase with the move to cloud-based hosting). Fintech firms also require a wide variety of services delivered at competitive prices to drive true business transformation and powerful customer experiences.

While technology platforms such as AWS can help facilitate a rapid launch of digital features for fintech firms, the sheer volume of enterprise solutions on the wish list can cause extreme overload on internal IT and development teams. How do you manage each service product roadmap, development, deployment, and optimization over time? A trusted AWS partner is critical for fintech companies that want to build future-ready applications at scale, without disrupting their current services.

At Bridgenext (former Emtec Digital), we helped Varo Bank (the first fintech to obtain a national bank charter) transition seamlessly from its mobile app to a secure, cloud-based banking platform. As a neobank with no physical branches, Varo wanted to offer customers easy and fast digital access to several application solutions. The Bridgenext team completed the migration with no disruption to Varo’s subscribers. The migration also provided Varo Bank with the opportunity to clean up backend code, introduce some new services, and incorporate “plug and play” applications that scale as they grow and meet the demands of their digital clients.

Conclusion

AWS is a premier enterprise solution and a robust platform that can help fintech firms develop and deliver innovative digital services to their customers. In a world where over 80%⁵ of consumers prefer digital banking, an advanced platform such as AWS can help your fintech firm migrate to a cloud-based, as-a-service model.

For fintech companies that want to elevate their services through banking platforms but struggle to make the switch to cloud-based infrastructure, a trusted partner who can alleviate the load and help engineer new services will make all the difference.

Ready to harness AWS and other digital tools for speed, agility, and growth? Contact Bridgenext Digital today.

References

https://www.statista.com/statistics/510333/worldwide-public-cloud-software-as-a-service/

https://www.statista.com/statistics/893954/number-fintech-startups-by-region/

https://www.crn.com/news/cloud/amazon-web-services-closes-in-on-40-billion-run-rate

https://thepaypers.com/payments-general/only-9-percent-of-major-banks-monetise-payments-data-report–1243574

https://www.consumeraffairs.com/news/online-banking-has-become-more-widespread-among-consumers-survey-finds-103119.html