Avoka: Small Businesses Still Forced Into Physical Bank Branches

Banks are starting to realize the need to innovate before a combination of mobile payments, online-only banks and other such issues loot most of banks’ market share. While banks are starting to come around, a new report from Avoka—the second-annual release of “State of Digital Sales in Banking”—is revealing unpleasant truths about bank innovation and its reach to small businesses.

One major measure on this front was revealed with how banks help customers open new accounts via digital platform. Such an effort is available for personal banking, more of the single, retail customer route, but not so much for the business banking. Only 24 percent of products could be opened online in business banking circles, and under 10 percent of products in that field could be activated via mobile device.

Avoka noted that, paradoxically, business banking was the more profitable product line—along with wealth management—but was also suffering from a significant shortage of new innovations. Small business needs more innovative applications, as small business owners have less time to get away from their offices, and thus need something that can more readily slot into small breaks in a schedule.

The good news for small business is that banks are visibly, if slowly, improving. The Avoka report found that big banks are stepping up investment in digitization and related customer-facing product, and better yet, it’s paying off. Two banks Avoka used for reference saw a better than 30 percent increase in their ability to sell products thanks to a new mobile device connection, and that means better potential revenue and improved customer experience.

It’s all about the customer experience, in the end; if the harried small business owner can’t get away to go to your bank branch, he or she may well seek out alternatives that will actually allow him or her to do business as desired. Granted, there are a certain amount of laws that prevent such things—Know Your Customer among them—from taking as much hold as we’d like, but there are still things that can be done.

While it’s not necessarily a good idea to shutter bank branches and go online-only, there’s still some room to innovate in this field. The better a job banks can do of innovation, the better off banks will be.