Awards for Excellence 2018
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Working out clever ways to allow customers to manage processes like payments and loan applications quickly and easily is a basic requirement of digital banking in 2018. But doing it in huge scale is complex and admirable, and all the more so when it meshes seamlessly with the human and physical side of the business. Bank of America has got all this right, making it North America’s best digital bank.
Bank of America’s digital bank alone would make it one of the bigger institutions in the country. The bank has some 10 million customers whose principal interaction with the bank is through mobile. In the first quarter of 2018, just over one quarter of new sales in BofA’s consumer bank were through digital channels, up from one fifth two years ago.
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| Michelle Moore |
Apps are all very well for handling the drudgery of banking, moving money from one account to another or making a payment to an individual or a firm. But BofA now offers customers the ability to transact in a more complex way with the bank, to buy a car or a house, for example. Applying for a home loan used to require hundreds of details to be handed over. Now an existing customer of the firm can apply in 15 minutes online, filling in perhaps 10 fields, through a digital mortgage portal. That might not suit everyone, however, and that is why the bank places an emphasis on using its digital offerings to promote and facilitate physical interaction with its staff. Using digital services to prepare for and make appointments to see staff is now easier than ever. Michelle Moore, the bank’s head of consumer advanced solutions and digital banking, describes it as a bridge to the physical, for the key moments in life.
“At Bank of America, mobile and financial centres exist in one ecosystem – one cannot exist without the other,” she says.
Digital also sits neatly into the bank’s drive to push into new markets in the US. Breaking into a new geography is easier when it is done through digital first. ATMs can give access to cash and accounts (fee-free through preferred rewards programmes), while instant issue credit cards and digital wallets allow more spending options. Physical financial centres can come later.
“It’s digital supported by physical rather than physical supported by digital,” says Moore.
And then there is Erica, a virtual financial assistant that is accessed through the bank’s mobile app. Erica was launched in March 2018 and had already passed one million users at the time of writing. She is partly the product of an exhaustive analysis of the hundreds of reasons why customers get in touch with the bank. At the moment, she offers payments, account information, card management services and transaction history searches.
Next up is a much more proactive level of service, with Erica checking up on what payments a customer has pending and the different options for settling them. Card activation will include informing merchants where your card is already registered. Budgeting tools will go further than now, with monitoring of spending habits and subscriptions – something that comes within BofA’s drive to better educate its customers on finance.
