BUILDING TRUST IN AN ERA OF DIGITAL BANKING
With an increasing trend in technology, digital banking is fast becoming the order of the day and customers are quickly aligning with this shift due to its convenience and popularity.
Digital banking has made it easy to save money, send cash to others, check account balances, apply for loans and other financial products in less time.
Despite all these, customers have always been in doubt that their private financial information is being kept safe from intruding eyes. In the era of digital banking, enabling trust and achieving high-security online platform is a huge essential for banks and customers as well.
Digitalization of the banking sector is being faced with a lot of threats which makes customers doubt the credibility of online banking. Some of these threats are:
- Unencrypted data: Leaving our data unencrypted is a huge way to let potential criminals gain access into our digital banking profiles. While “bank-level encryption” is mostly a marketing term, it’s still proof that your institution does not take this part of security lightly.
- Identity theft: Identity theft is as big a threat today in banking.
- Ransomware: Ransomware can be surprisingly scary. This term is concerned with a third party gaining access to and taking control of your computer and its files and then attempting to manipulate you by extorting money from you in exchange for restored access. After the victim pays up, there’s no assuredness that the thief will follow through with the negotiation.
Financial institutions can easily leave cybersecurity blind spots accessible for potential criminals. Thankfully, many well-known organizations now know the stakes and how to prevent problems when they can as well as responding quickly in a crisis when they cannot.
Trust is a necessity for the progress of any company. It plays a non-negotiable role in digital banking. However, digitalization of the industry provides a perfect avenue to fortify customers’ trust
Ensuring that security and trust related issues are met involves regular training, random spot checks and hiring for soft skills such as conscientiousness and being apt to details .
Of course, banks can do all of this and still fail to connect with their customers or communicate meaningfully about the measures they’re taking. That’s why the heroes of the show in the digital era are transparency and integrity. Banks can gain a competitive advantage by being transparent about their modus operandi and by taking the right precautionary measures before regulatory groups force their hands.
There are many factors that are vital to gaining the trust of customers in digital banking services. In the following, we will discuss five critical building blocks that form the bedrock for actively building trust in digital banking services.
INTEGRITY OF THE BANK AND BRAND EXPERIENCE
The integrity of a bank and its reputation has a major impact on the trust that clients place in it.
On the one hand, the stability of a bank is important: it consists of financial stability, security measures and size, as well as other things.
On the other hand, the client experience is also of crucial importance, i.e. how the client is treated, how the bank communicates with the client, and how the bank responds to and helps solve its client’s problems.
An enjoyable experience that a client encounters with the bank through other channels has a positive impact on the afore trust in the bank’s digital services. It is, of course, necessary that the customer also realizes a digital service as that of their financial service provider. Steady and integrated branding across all offline and online channels is the key to realizing this goal.
RELIABILITY OF THE SYSTEM
Digital services must meet the basic requirements for IT systems in order to convince a user that the platform in which he or she is operating on is reliable. While in an interpersonal relationship people try to analyze the motives and intentions of their partner, in a human-machine relationship they evaluate the reliability of the technical device. A system that is not available or accessible denotes that something is wrong with it, as do above-average loading times.
SECURITY AND PRIVACY
Security concerns are one of the main factors responsible for the adoption of online banking services.
The supposed security is of crucial importance for the trust of the customers. It is not sufficient to simply implement a system securely, the user must also view this system as secure. For these reasons, precautions for the security of the system should be communicated in a language convenient to the customer. It must always be ensured that any information about security processes that is available to the user is also accessible to a potential hacker.
USEFULNESS AND EASE OF USE
Another basic building block of confidence-building is useful services that meet customers’ demands and are user-friendly in operation.
Usability has been proven to be an important factor in building a relationship of trust between people and digital services.
In contribution to the actual usability, the direct benefit of a service for the customer is also considered. The more useful a service is, the more eager the customer will be to entrust his information to a service provider. Appropriate services and convincing usability can only be gotten in a design and development process by steadfastly involving the customers and future users.
TRANSPARENCY IN ALL AREAS
Another fundamental building block for enhancing trust is transparency. The more a customer knows about a service provider, the more convenient it would be for him to analyze the consequences of his potential conduct.
Also clients welcome the idea of lucid transparency on the part of the bank when it concerns the use of their data. For some users, this knowledge is even vital to build trust and is encouraged by control over their own data.
Digital banking is a great step forward for customers as well as the financial institutions serving them. As we’ve seen, banks are working relentlessly to employ the right staff and use advanced technologies to secure our profiles. However, we need to meet up with our own end of the bargain too and carry out the small steps available to us to ensure our most treasured information stays safe and secure. Bank with Mint is a digital bank committed to keeping customers’ data safe with different safety measures such as encryption of all data. All deposits are insured by the Nigerian Deposit Insurance Corpo