Marcom

Smart Social Banking – An Opportunity for Banks to Augment their Digital Footprint In an evolving business landscape of the Banking & Financial Services sector, digitalization, mobility, cloud, and big data analytics have emerged as top IT trends in recent times. As part of the digital revolution, Social Media has already occupied a place of importance for the banks and financial institutions to reach out to their customers and enhance their banking experience. Over the last decade, Social Media platforms have evolved quickly to become a part of our daily lives and they continue to grow significantly, aided by the accelerated internet penetration. Presently 4.57 billion people around the world use the internet, of which 346 million new users have come online within the last 12 months. Internet penetration is inevitably followed by an increase in Social Media users which currently stands at a staggering 3.96 billion, which is about 51% of the global population. 99% of social media users access their accounts through a mobile device (Sources: Statista, Kepios Analysis, Mediascope, Cafebazaar, and CNNIC– July 2020). Social Media has gained immense popularity, particularly among the younger generations, as it not only makes available a choice of content but also a means to create content and share with the world instantly. Although the Banking industry was relatively slower to realize the potential of Social Media, today, many leading financial institutions around the world have smoothly embraced it to facilitate instantaneous and transparent communication with their customers. Banking activities on social media are currently limited to marketing products, acquiring new customers, providing customer support, and engaging the customers. Social Media has enabled banks to reach out to far more customers than traditional channels, leading to significant efficiencies in customer acquisition costs. Through transparent customer feedback and convenient customer support through the Social Media platforms, banks have scored significant advantages with respect to customer experience. However, the data-points on the growing internet penetration combined with the business uncertainties stemming from the COVID-19 pandemic, compel for a far more advanced role of Social Media platforms in the Digital Banking experience for the customers. The practice of social distancing is likely to continue even after the pandemic subsides, making the branch visits for day-today banking transactions unpopular. This only reinforces the need for aggressive transformation of Digital Banking services, including Smart Social Banking solutions to enable financial institutions to offer transactional banking services on the Social Media platforms. But few banks are open to this idea yet, owing to concerns about data privacy & security risks. But the security risks and data privacy issues are not unsolvable. Advancements in Cloud Services, Data Management, and Disaster Recovery, etc., have made it possible for banks to offer safe access to bank accounts and enable secure transactions online, anytime, anywhere. These security best-practices can be adopted to extend transactional banking services even through Social Media [...]