36 MARCH / APRIL 2019 DIRECTORS / SENIOR MANAGEMENT Survey on 2019 Bank Strategies Steve DuPerrieu Vice President of Product Management CSI steve.duperrieu@csiweb.com CSI Secure Connect and CSI WatchDOG Social Compliance are Preferred Service Providers of the Indiana Bankers Association. What will rise as the hot-button issue for bankers in 2019? To find out, CSI annually polls executives at U.S. financial institutions across the country, asking questions to uncover the strategies and issues they believe will most affect the financial sector in the year ahead. This year, 220 bankers answered the survey. Among the findings, five key topics stood out: customer acquisition, digital banking, cybersecurity, regulatory compliance and lending. Customer Acquisition Key data – • 44 percent of bankers are adding self-service options, such as online account opening; 17 percent are adding interactive teller machines/in-lobby tellers; and 19 percent are pursing merger-and-acquisition activity. • 39 percent of bankers recognized loans as the most important channel for attracting new customers in 2019. • 32 percent of bankers see self-service account opening as essential to improving the customer experience. Customer acquisition is the name of the game, and it’s a battlefield out there. How are banks stepping up to the fight? Automated online account-opening solutions are a strong vehicle to both increasing banks’ customer base and solidifying existing account relationships through cross-sales. Elsewhere, bankers are dead-on in naming loans as the most important channel for acquiring customers in 2019. The market is quite favorable despite rising interest rates. However, without a solid presence in digital lending, you’ll likely miss this opportunity. Digital Banking Key data – • Approximately three in four banks plan to offer person-to-person (P2P) by the end of 2019. • 72 percent of bankers cite expanding digital channels as the primary means to improving the customer experience. • Four out of five bankers are confident in their institutions’ mobile banking apps. The average P2P transaction is $150+, clearly not the small-dollar, meal-splitting transactions originally thought. So why the holdout for the remaining 25 percent? “Is it that they think it’s too expensive relative to customer demand, or simply that they don’t think their customers want it?” asks Dan Latimore, senior vice president and head of banking with Celent. “Fair enough, if they’ve done their homework, but if it’s just a gut feeling that their customers don’t want it, that’s not great.” In addition, while bankers plan to strengthen digital capabilities, they should remember that customer-facing technology delivered through seamless core integration can empower customer engagement. As one bank compliance manager observes: “If we don’t make things more convenient for our customers, both through digital channels and with our customer service in general, we’re going to lose them to other companies like Amazon.” Cybersecurity Key data – • 44 percent of bankers say the No. 1 issue affecting the financial industry is cybersecurity. • 72 percent of bankers said they will spend up to 20 percent of their budgets on cybersecurity. • Nearly all bankers (96 percent) noted that employee
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