It might surprise you – we think it’s payment alerts, or rather what their increasing uptake portends. From October 2016 VISA have made it mandatory for US issuers to offer them (with Mastercard due to follow suit this March). There is pressures on banks outside the US to implement them, too – they’ve been a popular part of Apple and Android Pay, and are effective in the fight against fraud. This growing impetus offers significant opportunities for increasing customer engagement that go beyond the alerts themselves.
The reason for this is lies in the implementation route for alerts. They require an additional technological ‘layer’ within the payments process – often a bugbear for major banks, whose legacy systems can mean a slow execution time. Once in place however, it opens doors to additional functionality – direct control over when and where a card can be used, how much can be spent with it, and more.
This is functionality which is usually only provided over the phone by banks, if it is offered at all. But with the infrastructure for alerts in place, banks are well positioned to execute and evolve a system to allow their customers to do all this from their smartphones.
There are some obvious benefits to implementing this, and some not so obvious benefits. A key boon for banks is the increased face time they are able to get with customers who use such a system – ‘customer engagement’ is a major buzzword du jour among senior mobile and innovation teams in retail banking. This goes hand in glove with the equally sought-after ‘banking beyond the branch’ – i.e. offering all or most of the same functionality as a branch via digital, while retaining the benefits to the bank that the branch brings (chiefly, the opportunity to build relationships, build loyalty, and increase revenues by selling additional services).
