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As your organisation takes steps to embed Open Banking into your everyday operations, it is important to consider the order of what you need to do.
One of the first objectives is to gain consent from your customers to share their data. Before you do this, you need to have the right systems in place that can manage and store this data – securely. Get this right, and you will likely win the trust of your customers and create a foundation for better, long term relationships.
In this blog, we outline 6 approaches that could help you to build better, trust-based customer relationships in the evolving data-sharing environment.

Strategy 1: Build trust with your brand

Banks are perceived by customers as highly secure organisations. Your brand is important here. Essentially you can leverage your brand and the trust you already have to help educate your customers on the new processes aligned to data sharing.
Challenger banks have the challenge of not only communicating their value proposition, but to also build credibility and trust too. All at the same time.

Strategy 2: Secure your systems and processes

It’s important you develop strong systems and processes.
Measures such as the Open Banking Registry will ensure that data is only shared with FCA-accredited organisations. Additionally, the use of your bank’s own ID authentication process will help to facilitate the secure data exchange between organisations. This is along with encrypted APIs (Application programming interface) used for data security.
When the GDPR comes into force next year, you may also decide, or need, to implement certain measures to better protect your customers and their sensitive data. However, rather than seeing this as a compliance challenge, measures to support GDPR can be used to deliver even greater value for customers and you should understand more about how you can adopt and maximise this regulation.
Requirements to use customer data only for a specific purpose, encrypt it, and retain it for a limited time only, may seem like challenges. But, these measures could help you increase trust and transparency in data sharing and reduce the risk of hacking and other threats.

Strategy 3: Empower your customers to change their minds

Customer consent sits at the heart of everything. And, this is where Open Banking and GDPR become perfectly aligned. The customer is now in control and you need to be able to give them options to share their data – as well as the ability to change their minds. Whenever they want.
With years of customer data stored in your servers, and often not in a single uniformed place – this may be a tricky task. To do this there are two fundamentals:

  1. The need for a robust single customer view
  2. The need to create a dashboard where customers can manage their consent – whenever they want (and however they want)

Strategy 4: Ensure you are covering every channel of engagement

What does your omni-channel strategy look like? How will you manage the different channels your customers interact with? Do you even know what they are and how each is used?
Open Banking is centred on online banking. But, millions of people still visit a branch. How will you:

  1. Move everyone to a digital banking platform?
  2. Cater for your customers on every channel?

Strategy 5: Create strong digital identities

Access to customer data, be it transactional data or data from external sources such as social networks, or other data sources, can help you to create a more informed ‘single view of the customer’. One of the technologies that enables this is data ‘pinning’, which pins data from multiple data sources to a single customer profile.
In the future your organisation may be able to use digital identities to improve identity management, protect against fraud risks and greatly increase the convenience for your customers. It may also be possible to verify a customer’s identity across multiple organisations, streamlining their service experience too.

Strategy 6: Make sure you lend the right amount to the right person


Transactional data will inevitably give you a much better view of what a customer’s spending patterns are. You are no longer reliant on them giving this information – but can instead qualify their inputs with what you can now see in their statements.
You will also be able to see much sooner if your customers are heading towards any financial difficulties. This means you can help them sooner and hopefully pre-empt it spiraling into a much bigger situation. If they do become financially strained, you can use self-serving tools to help them in a sensitive time.
You can manage credit limits with much more confidence and information and you can ensure you are giving the most relevant products to the right people.
There are many changes you can make in order to maximise Open Banking – and maximise the opportunities for better customer service and experience. But, Open Banking brings more than data sharing into the equation. It influences your decisioning, your customer management, and your security infrastructure. With so much to look at, why not speak to us about how we can help you build the right strategy that acts as a foundation for you to grow from?

You may also find interesting:

Download a copy of our Open Banking whitepaper – creating a new era of data sharing.
6 Opportunities for growth using Open Banking