Fintechs re-inventing with deep ‘Client-Centricity’ focus

With product differentiation being vital for the digital financial services industry, fintechs are transitioning from a product-centric approach to a customer-centric focus one to drive market edge. They are increasingly moving away from mere day-to-day transactions with clients to more meaningful and impactful interactions with a client-first mindset. 

Pivotal to this approach is customer intelligence: listening to clients, co-creating with them, and ultimately delighting has emerged as top priority for fintechs. This requires fintechs to understand their clients’ business, and the needs of their customers, with an intent to predict requirements rather than merely responding.

Building Personalized Experiences 

Creating personalized experiences for users is integral to building a loyal customer base for one’s clients. Personalization needs to be relevant, timely, ‘phygital’, and fit-for-purpose to delight customers and their users. It is the journey from being a ‘short order cook’ to becoming a ‘chef’. Creating personalized use cases requires combining customer demographics, past behaviors and experiences, with the customers’ current preferences. It is all about how you respond to streaming data and customer preferences in real time. 

Fintechs need to understand end user behaviors more deeply to provide consistent responses while also providing flexibility for last minute customization via a ‘message bus’ and personalization via micro-apps. Sample this - voice enabled commerce where a consumer can use a voice command to pay for fuel from the comfort of his/her car.

Codifying Customer Behavior 

Servicing customers is extremely time sensitive in any industry. For instance, a food delivery service is all about optimizing - kitchen time, delivery route, parking time, order delivery and making this entire process visible to the consumer. Fintechs leverage the confluence of technologies to achieve success in this domain. 

At first, automatic data ingestion across various structured and unstructured data formats for massive volumes of data is done. Developing data lakes, like true freshwater lakes, that are constantly being refreshed with new data to deliver real time meaningful insights is a critical next step. Sample this in a real-world scenario - a food delivery service gives customized offers, based on card usage, that consumers can redeem at point of sale. Now this kind of client-centricity can be displayed by harnessing the power of data through application of new technologies.  

Talent Pool with ‘Digital Quotient’ 

While ‘client-centricity’ is a mindset and behavioral in nature, skilled talent forms the foundation of it all. It is incredibly important to build a talent pool that has a high ‘digital quotient’ to take on the journey from minimum viable products (MVPs) to minimum delightful experiences (MDEs) while keeping client at the heart of it all. Organizations across geographies and industries are focusing on attracting the best talent that is highly engaged and aligned to a deep sense of purpose. Fintechs are investing heavily in embracing collaboration tools for ideating, strategizing, and solutioning to win in the talent marketplace and engage talent.

The secret sauce for success, is to develop associates as lifetime learners - resilient, adaptable, curious, experimentative and a solution mindset. Successful fintechs create evolved career paths such as product owners or system reliability and DevOps engineers. They have learning platforms that are pervasive, highly curated, with role relevant industry and technology content, consumable at any time. 

Faced with dynamic customer preferences, fintechs are constantly realigning themselves to an ever-evolving industry landscape. For fintechs, a deep sense of client-centricity is essential to remain relevant and valued in their clients’ eyes.  This includes knowing who the clients are, what are their business challenges and goals, what industry they operate in, who are their peers and their proposition, and to be aware of every possible client persona. With client-centricity at the core, teams at fintechs are then structured - from concept to product design to implementation - around the clients’ needs. 

The article has been written by Sachin Kulkarni, SVP - Delivery, Global Services, Fiserv