Five areas of improvement for online banking

October 2013

Despite corporates wanting more, their online banking experience is lagging behind the times. Research from the Aite Group examined five key online banking initiatives to gauge corporate demand.

Corporate customers’ expectations in regards to their online banking experiences are higher than ever before, driven in part by the customised experiences treasurers enjoy in their personal lives from online retailers such as Amazon.com. However, most corporates are served through outdated bank technologies.

For example, according to the Aite Group’s recent report ‘Enhancing the online customer experience: feedback from corporate treasurers’, it is “not uncommon for corporations to face multiple system logins, non-intuitive customer interfaces that require searching and navigating the website, and reports that don’t meet their needs. The result has been low customer satisfaction levels and a corporate perception that banks don’t understand their needs.”

In order to better understand market conditions, the Aite Group surveyed 185 US-based corporates, mainly Union Bank clients, regarding the impact of several planned bank initiatives on improving their overall online cash management experience.

The research took stock of the following five bank initiatives:

1. Dashboards: 66% of those surveyed believe that a more customised dashboard is ‘very important’ to ‘extremely important’ to improving their overall online cash management experience.

2. Tighter system integration/portal creation: more than half (52%) of treasurers surveyed believe that single sign-on and a consolidated view will enhance their online banking experience.

3. Easier data exchange between bank and corporate systems: 67% say that having tighter integration and easier data exchange between the bank site and their ERP/accounting system for better straight through processing (STP) to improving their overall online cash management experience is ‘very important’ to ‘extremely important’.

4. Reporting: only 19% of corporate treasurers surveyed describe their bank’s reports as ‘highly customisable, easy to use and provide their organisation with that they are looking for’; whereas 22% create almost all of their own reports.

5. Real-time data: 81% of corporate treasurers state that access to more real-time information is critical to improving their online cash management experience.

In conclusion, the report states: “Tomorrow’s problems can’t be solved with yesterday’s technology. Banks must invest in newer, more flexible systems, break down silos to pave the way for integration, and focus on system usability.”