The Big Reshuffle of Financial Services Business Priorities

A reality check based on the latest Salesforce report

Customers’ concerns are pointing to low levels of impact and satisfaction from the up-to-date digitalization in financial services.

A recent Salesforce survey, “State of the Connected Customer,” reports that only 27% feel that the financial services industry is actually customer-centric, and only 23% think that the industry handled the pandemic well! At the same time, customer expectations post-pandemic are elevated.

Now, how disappointing is this market feedback after billions of dollars spent in funding Fintech innovations and with hundreds of Fintech unicorns globally?

Salesforce`s recent survey provides multiple insights around the reshuffling of priorities in financial services institutions (FSIs) globally. The 2,500 respondents (not all Salesforce customers) have changed their business priorities. The report compares the top 10 list of business priorities at the end of 2019[1] and the priority changes after the pandemic.[2]

The biggest change is in de-prioritizing customer experience (CX), which used to be the top priority and seems to have dropped to number five. This means that services that improve customer experience like automating account transfers, portfolio optimization, or nearly instant claims processing, are less important than the implementation of new technology or the automation of various internal processes.

I am actually surprised mostly by the de-prioritization of “enhancing security” that is reported to have dropped by three places and is no longer in the top five business priorities. This led me to look into the differences in reshuffling across wealth management and retail banking and across various regions. This is important as the sector is in a re-bundling phase and wealth management and retail banking are two traditionally siloed areas with different digitalization maturity.