Have you met the quiet quitter?
Of course you have: it's the customer that's been with you forever but hasn't grown with you in years. The one that knows their favorite teller's birthday but reluctantly buys elsewhere when your product or experience can't compete.
They've been slowly quitting your institution, with one foot out the door.
But all of that is about to change.
Banks and credit unions face a market imperative to become more digital and do it quickly. In many cases, gaps in core vendor offerings force institutions to acquire and deploy fintech point solutions.
The emerging problem from these trends is that fintech providers often require institutions to deploy a new tech stack to adopt their solutions or-worse yet-rip and replace existing technology. Even bigger than the technology challenge is the significant process change that comes with a new system. The operational disruption can be significant.
This traditional approach to software deployment brings other challenges. Each new vendor adds duplicative costs for data storage, API maintenance, and 3rd party data access charges. They also add to due diligence efforts and ongoing vendor management costs.
Finally, each new tech stack adds risk: your data security is only as good as your weakest fintech. We believe that over time, as the industry stacks more and more fintechs on top of enterprise systems, we could see a fallout similar to the BaaS space: weak controls leading to frequent PII leaks and a regulatory response to the problem.
The Modern Way
The battle for the customer today is 80% experience and 20% product and process. In our opinion, ledgering and transaction platforms such as the bank core or LOS have reached a maturity end-state. Newer underlying tech can improve speed and data access, but there's not much more one can ask of these systems functionally.
So attacking the customer experience requires new systems, but is it necessary to deploy turnkey, end-to-end solutions? Is the juice worth the squeeze?
Ascent's thesis is that enterprise APIs now allow fintech's to ride on top of enterprise systems versus burrowing into the bank. Using lightweight, modern SaaS technology, Ascent unlocks new value from existing systems. It frees bankers from the typical manual back-and-forth effort on product applications, and gives them more time to engage effectively with customers. It's a great experience for the customer and accelerates sales with very little change to middle- and back-office processes. It also frees executives to select and quickly deploy the solutions they need with less cost, less disruption, and less risk.
Additionally, by riding across existing systems, Ascent connects them at a data level, collecting real-time information from customer interactions that can be reused every time the bank and customer engage. This improves relationships with new and existing customers, and drives loyalty in a new and exciting way!
Ascent offers many benefits:
- It simplifies and speeds integration into the financial institution's infrastructure
- It future-proofs your organization to launch new products and continually adopt the latest and greatest approach
- It collects and reuses customer data across all product lines in real-time
- It reduces due diligence and vendor management overhead
- It provides greater control and security over point-of-sale data
“Let's add more silos in our institution”
The battle for the customer happens in the experience, and leveraging data is how to win it.