The Fintech Innovation Summit 2021 is where the world’s leading CEOs and leaders in the diverse segments of the fintech industry, from payments through lending to compliance, shared their points of view on what is working for them right now regarding innovation in customer experience. Read about the key highlights from the event here!
Market leaders are fintech firms that focus on customer-centricity instead of technology perfection
In her keynote speech 'Accelerate transformation, build relationships and inspire customer trust,' Alison Olsson, the Regional Vice President of Salesforce, opened up by describing the crisis of trust between customers and organisations, as well as the big shifts in changing approaches to privacy and security around the world.
Keynote Lessons Learned:
The customer trust crisis: Challenger Banks and other fintech companies will have an increasingly tough time competing not only with the traditional financial services players but also with new competition as 73% of millennials would be excited to try new financial services offerings from companies like Google or Apple or Amazon instead of their own bank (Source: Salesforce)
Autonomous finance: Leveraging AI helps fintech companies to reduce very manual and repetitive processes and bring up teams that take care of the customers to focus more on personalized relations. In the hyper-growing fintech companies, the agents and representatives act more as advisors with more strategic and value-bringing partners.
Customer-centric organisations: Tandem, the UK Challenger bank simplified their processes using Salesforce so that submitting an application for a mortgage only takes 15 minutes instead of the standard 90 minutes and slashed their customer service response times on a live chat to 12 seconds - a great example of customer-centricity in the financial services sector (Tandem Customer Success Story available here)
“People don't wake up in the morning and suddenly decide that they need to apply for a bank loan. So the question becomes, how do we focus on the customer and not just selling the product or building a great mobile app or chatbot, but they need to think end-to-end from the customer perspective and humanise the interactions.”
Alison Olsson, Regional Vice President at Salesforce
Fintech Innovation Panel Discussion with CEOs
In the second part of the Fintech Innovation Summit, we were honoured to welcome Bertrand Theaud, Andy Chan and Claus Christensen for a knowledge sharing session. These founders shared their insights around the theme of innovation and how they remain at the top of their performance as well as overcoming obstacles to continue to grow.
Artificial intelligence for the underwriting models and highly-skilled team for the strategic thinking
Qupital is a Hong Kong-based provider of cross-border e-commerce sellers with high-quality financing services and is a great example of a company that is automating its business processes to free a highly qualified and well-educated team of credit analysts. Qupital has served over 500 e-commerce sellers by providing more than US$500M worth of loans.
Andy Chan, the Co-founder and CEO of Qupital shared how his company uses big data and self-developed risk control models to improve the financing efficiency by digitalizing the financing process.
The future of underwriting: Qupital is leveraging machine technology to free up the human capacity for high added value work. Qupital stores more than 2 billion records of transactions, refunds, and order cancellations from their e-commerce clients and lets the machines analyse the data in their big data lake to create the underwriting model.
More opportunities for expansion: This model has proved strategic as Qupital recently secured US$150 million Series B investment led by GBA Homeland Development Fund and their expansion plans cover China as well as the western world including London and New York, where there are a lot of merchants and potential.
“Earlier we had a slogan Qupital Quick Quality Capital but now we have moved to Quantitative Capital. We have more than 2 billion transaction records from our e-commerce merchants in our big data lake and machines to create underwriting models so that our team of analysts focus on high-level thinking.”
Andy Chan, Founder and CEO Qupital
Customer onboarding must be a great experience even with more extensive anti-money laundering checks in place
Know Your Customer is the pioneer in an often overlooked segment of anti-money laundering compliance, aka the digitisation of corporate onboarding and KYB - or 'Know Your Business' - processes. Claus Christensen, CEO and co-founder of Know Your Customer, cloud-first digital compliance solutions, shared what are some of the key challenges when implementing innovative technology.
Key highlights include:
Easier onboarding with more requirements: The current revolution in the compliance industry is in large part driven by every-increasing customer demands for a seamless onboarding experience, while on the other hand, the regulatory requirements are getting more and more complex. Management of these processes is now only possible through technology and innovation.
The two speeds challenge: However, there are huge cultural differences between providers and buyers of RegTech solutions. Large organisations may struggle to catch up with RegTech firms' agile way of working, while RegTech companies often have to adjust to the long-term thinking of large organisations. The "Move fast and break things" mantra does not work as easily when there are hundreds of thousands of employees and customers impacted.
Focus on the customer benefits: For any fintech firm, it is absolutely critical to be able to guide large organisations and share with them how this technology is able to get them closer to their customer and to make the day to day work more human for the users.
“Artificial Intelligence in AML compliance segment is important, but it is not the answer to everything. You can leverage machines to take care of the most tedious and repetitive tasks, but humans still need to take the final decision.”
Claus Christensen, CEO, Know Your Customer
Customer retention is a key play for any fintech company to achieve hyper-growth in the SME payments sector
To round off our panel discussion we were delighted to welcome Bertrand Theaud who is the CEO of Statrys. Bertrand founded Statrys because he saw how challenging it was for entrepreneurs to get access to a traditional bank account. Statrys are rapidly expanding their offering of versatile business accounts, borderless payments as well as locations and business operations.
Key highlights include:
Retaining customers is a key goal: As a challenger to traditional banks, Statrys won the hearts of many entrepreneurs before and especially during the Covid-19 pandemic. The company was flooded with new account openings as founders could not travel to Hong Kong. During this period they have learnt that attracting clients might not be the most important challenge, but retaining them could be. This is due to the fact that there are hundreds of options on the market and also because of the changing needs of founders as their companies grow internationally.
Importance of customer service: Statrys knows the important role that customer service plays in understanding the needs of their clients. Statrys are listening closely to feedback specifically using a human customer service approach. This is especially important due to the nature of their business which is dealing with their client's funds, a very sensitive topic.
Customer feedback turned product features: Statrys have implemented one of their fast-growing services - 24/7 foreign exchange transfers and a lot more features in their products based on the customer feedback
“Human approach to our customer service is key, especially when dealing with their funds and sensitive information. Our focus is to leverage technology to make it a great experience for our clients, not to reinvent the industry using technology.”
Bertrand Theaud, CEO, Statrys
Workshop: 32% more revenue with sales and marketing alignment
Many companies struggle to provide an integrated customer experience because the systems, data, processes and organisational structures are becoming more complex. However, research shows that companies that align sales and marketing teams can reach 32% more revenue and retain 36% more customers.
Why and how companies should align sales and marketing teams with a help of Salesforce.
The why: The B2B buying process is changing
More complex: The typical buying group for a complex B2B solution involves 6 to 10 decision-makers
Social Media influence decisions: 84% of C-level/vice president executives use social media to support purchase decisions
Remote first - 57% of Buyer's journey is completed before the customer have first contact with the company
How to align the team?
Single source of Truth: A single system where marketing has visibility into the lower funnel on closed business influenced by campaigns and sales have visibility into the upper part of the funnel
Customer persona: Profiles of ideal customers should be created in collaboration between sales and marketing, never just by marketing
Marketing first approach: Give your sales time a real-time understanding of what campaigns your customers and prospects have interacted
Joint KPI's: Revenue growth should be a joint success indicator for both sales and marketing teams