Celent: Tablets will catalyse online banking

When RBI published an article
on the potential of tablets in the retail banking space at the
end of March, the key question was: “how relevant
are tablets for banks’ in their quest to retain consumers and keep
up with an increasingly tech-savvy client base?”

Turns out – tablets will indeed be relevant
for banks’ customer retention strategies, at least according to the
latest report by financial research and consulting group
Celent.

Celent’s Top Trends in Retail Online
Banking found that tablets “will act as a
catalyst to redesign online banking”.

The report forecast that tablets “present a
slew of capabilities to banks that are long due to provide an
improved user experience online.”

Key findings of tablets’ potential
were:

• Tablets will contribute to the design and user experience of
  online banking dashboards;
• Tablets will spur the interest by banks in an online dashboard
  – the report argued that consumers who used tablets were becoming
  “immediately aware of how poor the online banking user experience
  is at most banks”, and
• Tablets will help banks recognise that online, tablet and
  mobile banking require a common framework.

“A whole new collection of
valuable content”

The findings of the Celent report confirm what
Celent’s senior banking analyst Bob Meara told RBI in
March:

“Banks could invest in relevant content they
didn’t do on the internet – because browsers don’t render video
that well – and they haven’t done that on the iPhone because that
was primarily a transaction-based mechanism.

“Tablets add in a whole new
collection of content that will be valuable to customers,” Meara
said.

However, he had added that the success of
tablets would depend on three factors: systems integration,
development effort and, in some cases, resistance:

“Banks ask: ‘We’ve got a long list
of things already to do – are we confident enough tablet banking is
really going to produce compelling business? The answer is ‘No’ in
the short term.”

This resistance links well to other key
findings of the latest Celent report, the key conclusion being that
the banking industry has neglected online banking.

Key concluions of the report
were:

• Most banks are still “dabbling” with personal financial
  management tools;
• Banks have to begin to overhaul online bill payment services,
  which is different, and often difficult, in comparison with other
  online services because banks tend to outsource bill payment
  software;
• Banks integrate merchant-funded rewards programs are into
  online banking;
• Self-service channels are a way to please customers and cut
  costs

However, Celent claimed that it was an
“exciting time” for online banking and that it was becoming a
mainstream channel that banks need to pay attention to.

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