Culled—-Proshare
September 4, 2020
by KPMG Nigeria
About the KPMG Digital Channels Scorecard
The stakes have never been higher when it comes to businesses delivering their promise to customers. As consumers become more attuned to using apps for everyday life events from social connection to social networking, online news, shopping online and working online, they are expecting nothing less from businesses with which they are associated. These businesses need to reimagine how user experience (UX) design principles are factored into every aspect of the interaction with customers on their digital platforms.
The KPMG Digital Channels Scorecard unveils in-depth sector and domain insights from our user journey-centred assessments. It includes a benchmark of Digital Channels for retail banks in Nigeria using the proprietary KPMG Digital Channels UX Assessment Framework which employs the “mystery shopper” review approach. This edition of the publication covers the 17 commercial banks that have a strong focus on retail banking. These banks have international or national banking licenses and retail banking operations across the country. The 17 banks are listed in alphabetical order below:
- Access Bank Plc
- Ecobank Nigeria Plc
- Fidelity Bank Plc
- First Bank of Nigeria Ltd
- First City Monument Bank Ltd
- Guaranty Trust Bank Plc
- Heritage Banking Company Ltd
- Keystone Bank Ltd
- Polaris Bank Ltd
- Stanbic IBTC Bank Plc
- Standard Chartered Nigeria
- Sterling Bank Plc
- Union Bank of Nigeria Plc
- United Bank for Africa Plc
- Unity Bank Plc
- Wema Bank Plc
- Zenith Bank Plc
Digital Channels Scorecard for Retail banks in Nigeria
We are in unprecedented times. The COVID-19 pandemic has thrown the global socio-economic environment into turmoil. The turbulence continues to rage as the spread and fatality of the virus are yet to be contained. Social distancing and significant restrictions to movement have hampered social and economic activities at a scale not previously seen in modern times. It is now certain that the world, post-COVID19, will be markedly different.
One of the enduring responses to the COVID-19 pandemic is digital. In simple terms, businesses need to improve digital capabilities in order to deliver products and services via digital channels. It is in this light that KPMG has performed a Digital Channels Scorecard for retail banks in Nigeria. The Scorecard provides an industry perspective of how effective banks are in delivering products and services to customers via digital channels. It measures the quality of UX as customers traverse a range of journeys to access products and services on 4 distinct digital channels – Mobile banking, Internet banking, USSD, and Chatbot. The Scorecard covers 13 anchor journeys grouped into 5 thematic areas, viz:
Digital Onboarding – includes journeys spanning account opening and customer profile creation on any channel of choice.
Payments & Transfers – spans all types of payments and transfers, including bill payments, fund transfers and cardless withdrawal.
Digital Lending – includes all types of lending to retail customers via digital channels.
Self-Service – includes journeys spanning debit & virtual card request, card block, profile unlock, token request and statement request.
Customer Care – journeys related to customer engagement and issue resolution Based on our user journey-centred assessment of retail banks’ digital channels, we have categorised banks into 4 distinct categories: Leaders, Challengers, Followers or Late Starters.
Leaders can onboard customers digitally end-to-end without the need to visit branches or agents; are delivering innovative products to enrich payment & transfer offerings; have embarked on an aggressive play to accelerate the Self-Service agenda for customers and are able to engage and resolve customer complaints on the channels.
Challengers performed well on the user journeys, but lack some of the key ingredients that should place them in the leaders’ tier. While they are able to offer effective user journeys on their channels, they fall behind the leaders on the array of capabilities and quality of user experience. These banks can become leaders in the near future if they are able to leverage design thinking principles to resolve user
experience issues and deploy innovative capabilities that will deliver an engaging digital experience on their channels.
Followers are unable to onboard customers digitally without requiring them to visit the branch, have several disjointed user journeys, limited self-service offerings and struggle with responding to and resolving customer complaints in a timely manner.
Late starters either do not have several important user journeys or offer several broken journeys. Late starters are unable to onboard customers digitally, have unwieldy user journeys, lack Self-Service offerings and struggle with respect to customer care.
The Scorecard provides a view of the competitive positioning of each bank with a two (2) dimensional view. The first dimension is based on user journeys, while the second dimension is based on the channels.
From an industry perspective, we note that banks need to build capacity to transform user journeys by embracing design thinking principles, onboard customers digitally, articulate a pragmatic self-service agenda that will further reduce traffic at branches, reduce cost-to-serve and operational risks, embrace digital lending and digitize contact centres to cope with scale.
The availability of products and services on some channels while absent on others portends a need to re-architect backend systems with a focus on APIs. Front-end systems (channels) should generally call services through APIs provisioned at the backend. The resilience of backend systems is still a primary concern affecting the availability of digital channels. Banks may need to relook backend systems to ascertain that the systems are adequately architected and sufficiently resilient to support the ambition to scale. Chatbot implementation is nascent but has the potential to improve customer engagement and complaints resolution if delivered across all channels as a service. Talent development and processes are imperatives for transforming digital channels and may well be the root cause of some of the shortcomings on the digital channels.
We observed that personalization is still in its infancy at most banks and consider that there is a significant opportunity for differentiation by banks who can potentially leverage analytics to provide contextual offerings and experiences to customers. We trust that you will find our Digital Channels Scorecard for retail banks in Nigeria insightful and look forward to your feedback.
