Things have been changing at a rapid pace in the environment with the stock market plunging, offices closing, travel curtailed, businesses losing direction. Like, everyone, we have also been analyzing the changes in the market and looking for opportunities to create value in this ecosystem. I personally believe that there would be no business that would remain unimpacted. There can be a positive impact or negative impact, but there is little chance of the status quo. How Fintech startups & Financial Institutions approach this change?
Analyze your customer behavior:
– Retail Customer expectations: Retail customers would be working from home and would have a higher need for digital transactions (payments, digital lending, insurance) and engagement.
– Corporate Customer Expectations: Corporate customers would also be working from home with tools provisioned by the corporate. They would need support to digitize their processes to reduce the impact. They would also like to work with their partners, who can source digital business as “offline” business suffers.
What can Fintech startups & Financial Institutions do?
– Enhance engage with the clients through digital media (newsletters, blogs, podcasts, reports, videos, etc)
– Simplify/digitize customer engagement channels as Personal Engagement may not be possible to onboard & service the customers
– Digitize back-office urgently to ensure that there is minimal business impact due to the closure of physical offices
– Practice Business Continuity Planning for few days and identify the new ways to engage with corporate clients including through partners available in the same location as the client (for those, who don’t have teams in client locations)
– Focus on digital training & certification of employees to ensure improvement in skills during this challenging period
– Rebaseline hiring numbers and skills to align with market changes including a higher focus on digital/tech resources to help in digitizing in the next few months.
– Save capital wherever possible like moving from fixed costs to variable cost model, identify high impact low-cost partners, etc.
What are the impacts as per you? What should Fintech startups & Financial Institutions do?