Into The Digital Banking Realm, One SME At A Time

It’s been well-documented that traditional banks and other financial institutions have their work cut out for them when it comes to moving toward the digital arena. FinTech upstarts have been relatively quicker to market. The key is for the financial institution to make a calculated push into the digital realm with a clear-cut roadmap, delivering value to consumers and business clients alike.

To that end, D3 Banking, a digital banking firm that serves both the consumer and small banking segments and which helps provide digital banking and financial management tools to those end users, has linked up with FI Navigator, which offers analytics to financial industry customers in order to deliver actionable insights on banking activity — stretching across more than 6,000 financial institutions in the U.S.

In an interview with PYMNTS, Mike Carter, chief marketing officer of D3 Banking, stated that the tie-up between the two companies allows for greater visibility into mobile banking usage and performance. D3, leveraging the FI Navigator platform, thus can serve banks in a B2B function.

The movement toward digital services has been a strong one, noted Carter, with the end result that “we have seen banks actively embracing a digital strategy,” where, in some cases and in the past, that trend was more reactive, especially in the face of continued competition from FinTech firms. The key, he continued, is that banks make sure that, as they embrace digital and as they see what might be developing even on a regional basis, “they have a digital strategy that goes beyond just ‘me too.’”

One consequence of this movement is that the digital landscape requires the abandonment of a “silo mentality,” where, as Carter said, “it’s all about the data.” He added that “we want to be able to provide the banks the tools they need to serve their customers,” especially with the emergence of millennial consumers who are technology-savvy and who demand access to services around the clock and regardless of location. FinTech, noted the executive, has not been encumbered by silo mentalities, and this means that those relatively more technologically advanced firms have been able to take data, extract value from that data and offer personalized services to clients.

For banks, small businesses represent greenfield opportunities. As noted in a study by Aite, banks are able to help small businesses by, in part, simplifying payments processes, helping boost financial acumen and even providing insight into data. With as much as 62 percent of businesses in the U.S. staffed by five or fewer employees, technology can be a boon in more effective banking, treasury management and across any number of financial functions.

For D3, said Carter, the B2B relationship exists as it serves the banks with both the data and the insight to act on that data. That is a relationship where industry analytics can come to bear on strategies for a bank as it works on shaping its digital offerings. For example, noted Carter, there may be the perception that a bank may do well to focus all of its nascent digital energies on attracting millennials, yet, said Carter, information can, in fact, pinpoint that the more rewarding efforts could be used to promote services to Baby Boomer (or even older) clients, said the executive.

In terms of information and display, Carter said benchmarking is given as a comparison across a number of the most closely linked competitors, and in the case of the mid-sized to regional banks that would most typically employ the joint services of FI Navigator and D3, regional benchmarks would cut across peer comps, specifically on mobile banking services.