by Aleksandar Jeremic, co-founder and managing director of fino “German banks must not rest if they still want to be relevant in five years' time.” Bundesbank CEO Burkhard Balz recently said this against the backdrop of growing competition from abroad. They are required to integrate further attractive online services into their portfolio and proactively submit tailor-made offers. Banks can achieve this with digital receipts and flexible data evaluation. Digital receipts are more than just an electronic form of annoying expenditure receipts. They contain data, for example about the issuer of the document, the time of purchase, the purchased items and their prices, including sales tax, and the payment method. In doing so, they provide information about both electronic payments and cash payments, which were barely traceable up to now. Since their information is available and recognized digitally, artificial intelligence can process it immediately. This in turn has great potential that banks can exploit — now and comprehensively with the help of innovative FinTechs. More than just money service providerIn practice, the targeted use of data enables them to expand their role as money service providers. For example, you can offer customers and interested parties services that receive and automatically organize receipts. Algorithms classify, store them securely and make it easy to find and export certain documents, for example in the event of a warranty or exchange or export for an expense report or tax return. If you give customers the option to link their bank accounts to the application via a PSD2 interface, receipts can be assigned to transactions. Combined with other services such as account analysis, customers receive a complete financial overview of all their purchases and spending as well as the opportunity to comprehensively and transparently understand their consumer behavior. Banks benefit from up-to-date overviews, which reflect the life situation of the respective customer more precisely than ever. They also automatically receive recommendations for action that enable them to submit personalized offers, for example for suitable financial products or services, at the right time and in the right way. Ensuring liquidity by the end of the month, achieving certain savings goals or implementing a complete financial plan? All of this is possible. At the same time, banks can use the information for customer risk assessments and offer installment loans. Additional services, such as insurance or warranty extensions based on the receipt, are also possible. If these are easy to use, for example with a click or touch in an app, banks are already setting accents during onboarding. Individual business models with future potentialThese and other use cases can be implemented easily and flexibly. Modular solutions allow an individual combination. In addition, various ways of providing information, for example via a web-based dashboard, in the banking application or as PDF files, make it possible to implement it in a wide variety of infrastructures. Regardless of their size, this gives banks the opportunity to build business models that increase cross-selling and upselling as well as customer interaction, which improve the customer experience and stand out from the competition in a positive way. This enables financial institutions to secure the relevance that Burkhard Balz has addressed. After all, the next generations of customers expect services that make their daily lives easier. Of course, they already use them in various areas at Apple, Amazon and Google. However, banks do not have to be inferior to these giants in terms of their core competencies if they work with FinTechs and make targeted use of their strengths. Buy in the future!
