CHICAGO—Nearly all millennials are digital consumers, but it's important to remember that not all digital consumers are millennials, Jim Marous, publisher of The Financial Brand, told his audience Thursday audience at BAI Retail Delivery.
Marous co-presented a session called "From Bricks to Click: Reaching the Digital Consumer 3.0," along with Benjami Puiddevall, head of electronic channels at CaixaBank in Spain.
To make his point, Marous polled the audience on its social media usage. Not surprisingly, a majority of people raised their hands.
"I look around the room and see a minimum number of millennials," he noted. "When we're talking about digital consumers, we need to get it out of our heads that they're all millennials, because that's an important distinction."
He later told the audience that "senior surfers" are actually the fast growing segment of the online community.
Marous provided various demographic statistics about the digital consumer. For example, 63% research financial services online and 68% want customization in their online experience. He noted that consumer expectations for financial institutions were not exclusively shaped by their interactions with their financial institutions.
"Consumers know what we can do technologically," Marous said, "because companies in other industries – companies like Amazon, Google and Uber – are showing them."
He said that although research seems to indicate that there's little interest in online services like account opening via mobile, this may be misleading.
"Be careful when you read research about what customers do," Marous told the audience, "because a lot of that barrier – a lot of that apparent lack of interest – is because FIs aren't providing a very good mobile experience in those areas."
Marous distilled the digital consumer down to three basic needs.
"They want you to know them, to understand them, and to reward them," Marous said. He added that delivery needs to go beyond omnichannel to what he called full integration. In this environment, a consumer can, for example, pause a transaction in one channel and resume it in another.
For his part of the session, Puiddevall discussed various digital initiatives that his bank had undertaken. He told the group that CaixaBank has its own "innovation lab" and that the bank develops most of its own technology in-house.
"What we call wearable banking is the next step in the evolution of mobile banking," said Puiddevall. He added that CaixaBank has devoted considerable resources to the research and development of wearable technology.
Puiddevall said according to research by The Boston Consulting Group, data traffic from wearable devices is about four petabytes per month now, but is expected to rise to 10 times that by 2017. Likewise, he said that IDC research predicts that wearable device sales will rise from six million worldwide this year to 112 million by 2018.
As for mobile payments, Puiddevall said that CaixaBank is focusing on NFC-based technology, since it can be embedded in virtually any device.
The two men left the audience with three takeaways and three predictions. The takeaways were:
- Conduct a digital maturity analysis.
- Simplify digital engagement.
- Consider an innovation lab.
The three predictions were:
- Digital consumers will soon represent the majority.
- Wearables will become increasingly relevant.
Digital payments will become a differentiator.
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