New FIS Study Talks What Consumers Want in Banking

It might seem, to the outside viewer, that banking is an industry on the brink of irrelevance.

With mobile payment systems stepping in to serve as both savings and checking at the same time, and peer-to-peer lending systems stepping in on much of the rest, it would be easy to brush aside banking’s importance.

Banks, not wanting to be the newest victim of the online movement, have some work to do to regain importance among customers, and a new study from FIS illustrates just what should be done.

Banking products proved the best weapon the banks had, as consumers increasingly wanted access to such tools, as long as they were sufficiently easy to work with.

Banks are falling down on the job in terms of loyalty, however, and the programs that are working so well at the retail level could be doing great things for banks as well.

Customers also want more in the aspirational department; plans for retirement or opening small businesses or the like could stand some support.

Millennials, naturally, proved a different matter altogether, wanting digital connection over reliability and transparency.

Those millennials who used banks were four times more likely to turn to a bank’s financial management app than to an independent source, so getting the millennials on one front helps ensure keeping them on others.

Millennials want faster loan processing, and 72 percent have no financial advisor of any sort.

What’s great about this is that it spells out, so clearly, just what banks need to do to get and keep customers.

More support for end goals, more digital options, and more financial planning could be a big winner with both current users and the upcoming crop of millennials.

The risk to banks here is that someone else will take this information and run with it, cutting banks out of the picture.

Banks are often large organizations, the least nimble, and often bound by certain regulations. The more banks push in this direction now, the better the chance of getting and holding business.

There’s a lot of opportunity contained in this report, and the sooner banks take advantage of it, the better. What’s at stake is no less than an entire financial way of life, and much of the banking industry as well.