With the constant evolution of the financial industry and consumer relationships now more digital, new challenges present themselves. A careful look is needed at adopting innovative technologies that improve people’s lives, operational efficiency, and business continuity. Issues related to the cost of customer acquisition, greatly inflated during the covid-19 pandemic, and the benefit of acquired customer bases in this paper become mandatory. But in addition to these issues, I present some other trends that should mark the year 2023.
- Engagement and loyalty
With increased competition and visible competition for financial solutions institutions, it becomes essential to optimize customer portfolio management. Engaging consumers through traditional channels and/or generic campaigns is not enough. For example, if you have a SaaS startup and the only requests that come from users are like “help with essay writing free“, then if it is impossible to provide value quickly, the startup will not stay on the market long. It is necessary to build a framework that allows us to see the customer and the business holistically, segment them and then innovate in the communication and activation rule. How to do it?
- By offering personalized products.
- Engaging inactive customers through better use of data.
- Making the customer the protagonist, regardless of the channel.
- Optimizing KYC (know your customer) tools.
- Making effective use of ecosystems and open finance.
- Offering a true omnichannel, integrated, and seamless experience.
- Integrated finance that enables new business
Macroeconomic uncertainties and capital flight in startups and fintech’s cause a realignment of priorities in the market. Large transformation projects experience a realignment, emphasizing shorter, value-generating journeys quickly. Enabling new digital financial products with agility, giving preference to SaaS, emerges among institutions’ priorities. Although the concept of embedded finance is not new, in 2023, we will see modalities more adapted to short-term value creation.
- Financial inclusion
The “forced” process of financial inclusion that we went through during the pandemic is indisputable. The unavailability of physical channels closed due to the pandemic led to the need to include people digitally. This movement has been reinforced by important regulatory changes in recent years and continues to be one of the priorities of the Central Bank of Brazil. In addition, we have fintech and neo-banks breaking paradigms and offering products to audiences historically excluded from the financial system. Open finance will also be a catalyst for financial inclusion, as greater availability of consumer information should construct products that are more adherent to the needs of the unbanked population.
- Easier investments
Another big trend for this year is fixed income. The scenario of inflation and high-interest rates attracts the investing public to fixed income. However, much remains to be done regarding product availability, the universalization of digital access, and the technological capacity of institutions to guarantee the processing of high transactional volumes inherent to the digital world. It is necessary to invest in modern technology so that the investment market can scale at the speed required by digital.
- Intelligent treasury and back-office
Treasury remains an area with plenty of room for automation and efficiency gains. Digitization of the back office has been a recurring theme in recent years, but there are immense opportunities. Thinking about agribusiness, for example, back-office processes for credit approval to the producer are extremely manual and take days or even weeks to complete. Such inefficiencies are detrimental to the farmer, cause the institution to stop doing more business due to a lack of personnel, take them away from more strategic tasks, and ending up inhibiting Latin America’s growth. The abundance of technology for property data validation, combined with automated risk analysis, has great potential to solve these challenges.
- Fraud control and compliance
Cybercrime and fraud are becoming increasingly common and advanced. We know this is a complex challenge, and there is no “silver bullet” to solve it, but there is a way to control it, bringing a balance between security and business generation. While many companies still view security investment as a “necessary cost,” seeing this area as a new business enabler makes more sense. Investing in end-to-end technologies that support business journeys from customer acquisition to real-time processing of transactions and purchases and mitigating the risks of financial, operational, and credibility damage is a matter of survival in our highly competitive landscape. The famous “digital identity” of the customer associated with network effect behavioral technologies can control risks, prevent fraud and money laundering, and expand the business.
Definitely, the year 2023 presents several challenges for industry challengers to demonstrate their value propositions and generate profitable business. On the other hand, incumbents with already validated value propositions will have to adapt their structures and strategies in search of greater efficiency and cost control. The fact is that technology continues to play an extremely relevant role for both in their challenges, so having specialized business partners and comprehensive and mature solutions can be differential to meet the challenges of today and tomorrow.
