This is article #5 in the series on optimizing banking and credit union innovation and productivity through AI and cloud communications.
Innovation in the financial services industry is largely fueled by technology. Staying ahead of the competition requires creative new ideas and well-placed investments, but it also calls for rapid execution. Cloud communication solutions have become an essential ingredient for banks and credit unions looking to shrink their time to market for innovative new products and services.
Unified Communications as a Service (UCaaS) accelerates innovation by streamlining collaboration, ensuring everyone is aligned and moving forward with precision. The right UCaaS platform helps teams across your organization remain in sync with one another, from project managers to frontline staff. That creates an environment where the exchange of ideas flows rapidly, and innovation proceeds faster. UCaaS enables real-time communication and coordination, regardless of where your employees work.
The ability to integrate with third-party applications through application programming interfaces (APIs) is also a game-changer for financial institutions. APIs allow banks and credit unions to quickly and easily connect their cloud communications technology with existing core technologies as well as external-facing services such as mobile banking apps and digital wallets. This can enhance product offerings, improve service levels, and increase customer satisfaction. API integration expands the range of services a bank or credit union can provide and accelerates the development and deployment of these services, providing significant competitive advantages and enabling personalization and improved productivity.
Enhanced collaboration leads to better, faster decisions
When teams are equipped with robust collaboration tools, they can communicate more effectively, sharing information in real time and working seamlessly across multiple departments, regardless of location. Simple, powerful connectivity ensures that all relevant stakeholders have access to the latest data and insights, enabling them to make informed, collaborative decisions quickly and confidently.
Decisions in a highly regulated banking industry often involve multiple departments, including compliance and risk management, marketing, pricing and product development. A unified communications platform allows team members to exchange rapid back-and-forth messages without the long delays typical of email chains. With a unified communications platform, decision-makers can engage in real-time discussions, promptly address concerns, and adapt their strategies quickly when necessary.
This added business agility speeds up the decision-making process and improves the quality of the decisions by ensuring that all relevant parties have a voice in the conversation. Enhanced collaboration tools break down geographical and departmental silos and foster open communication, ensuring that a diverse range of perspectives is taken into account.
Serving customers with enhanced innovation
With the right UCaaS platform, banks and credit unions can stay closer to their customers, responding to their needs faster than ever, and with greater empathy. Essential Federal Credit Union, for example, used RingCentral’s UCaaS platform to increase efficiency, improve collaboration, and supercharge responsiveness to member needs.
As a community-focused credit union, Essential FCU has always prioritized outstanding service to its members. Its reputation for excellence led to significant growth, and the credit union eventually recognized that the right technology could help it reach even higher levels of performance.
RingCentral’s RingEX enabled the credit union to speed customer access to call center representatives, improving member service and increasing employee efficiency. As the credit union continued to grow, it extended the UCaaS to include RingCentral RingCX, transforming its approach to member service and building unprecedented levels of member connection.
RingCentral’s technology provided the credit union with real-time insights that enabled a fundamentally transformed member experience. By understanding when its members were most likely to call, Essential FCU could ensure the right number of staff was available at the right times, reducing hold times and increasing satisfaction. The credit union could monitor calls in real time, addressing issues immediately and further enhancing the quality of its service.
AI-infused communications accelerate innovation
RingCentral’s AI-infused communication platform is revolutionizing how organizations innovate by enabling faster, smarter, more collaborative processes. In the financial services industry, the ability to swiftly introduce new products and services is a powerful driver of competitive advantage. AI-driven communication tools are helping banks and credit unions streamline decision-making, enhance collaboration, and uncover valuable insights.
AI-infused communications automate and enhance information flows. When a new employee joins a project midstream, they can come up to speed quickly using AI summaries and guidance. When a team member cannot attend an important conversation, AI notes can fill them in on what they missed.
AI can analyze vast amounts of data in real time, extracting key insights and delivering them directly to the right stakeholders. This allows teams to make informed decisions faster, without getting bogged down in manual analysis. For example, AI can extract and summarize customer sentiments, bringing valuable insights to the conversation about new products and services.
AI-powered analytics can provide organizations with deep insights into customer behavior, market trends, and internal performance metrics. By understanding what customers need and how they interact with existing products, banks and credit unions can devise innovative new offerings to address those exact needs. Perhaps just as importantly, they can do so faster than ever before.
Growth, without the growing pains
As organizations gain customers organically or grow through acquisition, they typically experience a range of challenges associated with scale. As a bank expands, the systems that served them well in the past might no longer be up to the task. Larger, more diverse teams may experience new challenges in communication and collaboration. A wider array of customers can bring new challenges as well.
A unified communications platform can minimize or even eliminate many of the challenges associated with rapid growth. Collaboration across geographical boundaries, for example, has historically been difficult, but a unified approach to communication breaks down those silos. Legacy phone systems don’t necessarily scale well if your company doubles or triples in size. Cloud-based communications scale effectively and effortlessly. A greater diversity of customers can imply different needs, or even different regulatory requirements. AI-infused UCaaS enables faster, more nimble responses to such changes.
In today’s highly competitive financial services industry, the ability to innovate quickly and effectively is critical. By leveraging advanced communication tools like RingCentral, banks and credit unions can accelerate their time to market and enhance their responsiveness to customer needs. As financial institutions continue to grow and evolve, adopting the right communication solutions will be key to staying competitive, maintaining strong customer connections, and thriving in an increasingly dynamic market.
Want to learn more? See our financial services solutions.
Originally published Sep 30, 2024
