Small and middle-size financial institutions play a major role in most economies throughout the world. Created with a community spirit, these financial institutions are often more aware of their clients’ specific needs and sustain the ability to create synergies and opportunities for local enterprises and individuals. However, the current digital revolution is presenting new challenges for these organizations. As the traditional branch banking model becomes increasingly obsolete, community-based banks and credit unions need to speed up their digital strategy, to compete with larger banking groups and keep up with the consumers’ expectations.
The hard reality is that this is a defining moment – or a “Blockbuster moment” – for a vast network of financial institutions. The digital uprising has changed and will keep changing, every aspect of traditional banking. Most banks and credit unions around the world are trying to redefine their technological strategy, as new players on the block – digital-only banks and fintechs – raise the bar in terms of customer experience, hoping to become the “Netflix” of banking.
Unable to perform the same massive investments that large banks realize to create their own digital platforms, smaller banking institutions need to find, nonetheless, suitable answers to swiftly undertake the digital transition and unlock new distributions models.
The analogy is well known: picture a huge and heavy flywheel. Now imagine the effort to get the flywheel rotating: the first push requires great strength and determination, but once the momentum kicks in, it tends to remain rotating and becomes easier to keep moving. For small and mid-size financial institutions, the digital transition may seem like this massive flywheel, too heavy to work with, but the ebankIT Omnichannel Banking Platform is designed to ease this first push and to keep the innovation wheel spinning.
Understanding that this has become an existential challenge, ebankIT has been focused on offering a steady stream of innovations, tailor-made to match the complexities of community-based banking models. From the very beginning, ebankIT Omnichannel Banking Platform accelerates the digital transformation and delivers a 360º approach. Financial institutions embrace a platform with an industry-leading time-to-market, that connects every banking channel, while banking customers enjoy a mobile-friendly, intuitive and interactive user experience.
Today, being responsive and intuitive is not enough anymore: consumers expect a full range of digital banking services beyond traditional deposit, loan and payment products. To match these growing demands, banks and credit unions need to establish a digital-first strategy and to continuously improve their offer. Enhanced with extensive customization capabilities and a full Integrated Development Environment (IDE), ebankIT enables financial institutions to create their innovation roadmap, tailor their catalog of services and quickly develop new applications and functionalities. After all, the flywheel must keep spinning and some features are impossible to fake or to under-deliver.
This flexible and highly adaptable approach is especially suitable for community-based financial institutions, that need to provide quick and suitable answers to their local clients and partners, in order to build longstanding and trustful relationships. With ebankIT, banks and credit unions also benefit from an intelligent system that uses state-of-the-art analytics strategies to offer the right product for each customer at the right moment.
This human-centric approach is the alpha and the omega of ebankIT’s innovation roadmap. Knowing that small and middle-size financial institutions need to excel in the ability to foster digital relationships, ebankIT has become laser-focused in humanizing the digital banking experience. We understand that digital banking doesn’t have to feel emotionless: it is possible to create person-to-person interactions remotely and to build trusting relationships, in order to build a more inclusive and personalized banking experience.