Challengers not immune to Covid-related consumer issues, Jitterbit says
By Sunniva Kolostyak
Tom Ainsworth, Account Executive UK/I, Nordics and South Africa at Jitterbit, discusses how 41 per cent of consumers in UK, Germany, Netherlands, Belgium and the Nordics have been unable to access some aspect of their banking or financial services during lockdown – but challenger banks have not capitalised on the shift due to growing pains.

Who is Jitterbit?
“We’re an integration platform. We allow our customers to integrate all their existing applications – marketing tools, CRM, sales, finance and everything in between – with little to no code required. Having visibility of their data at any time, any place and in any application gives our customers a complete view of the business and maximises their ability to innovate.”
How has COVID affected financial services overall – and what has this meant for challenger banks?
“One thing that has become apparent since COVID is that while many major projects have been put on hold, certain initiatives can’t be – if anything, they need to be accelerated. Customers need their banks to innovate quickly to meet their rapidly changing needs – and that requires better data integration tools.
“You might imagine that while conventional banking brands with legacy systems would struggle to transform their services, digital-first ‘challenger’ banks would be well-positioned to capitalise on these seismic shifts in consumer banking. But we’re seeing that some challenger banks actually have their own challenges too. Typically, infrastructure and systems that once worked are now proving unreliable. It’s an issue to do with scaling the business, which has now been amplified by this need to rapidly innovate due to COVID. Any manual processes in the business that were at one time or another introduced as a quick infrastructure fix have suddenly become massive bottlenecks. Challenger banks are finding it’s not enough to be digital-first – to survive, businesses need to be digital first, second and last.”
Has customer demand caught them off-guard?
“It’s not so much customer demand – it’s more customer expectation that’s caught some challenger banks off-guard. Rapid innovation, customer-centric, completely digital – these are the USPs of challenger banks. Their customers have very high expectations that these banks will be able to flex their offer, respond immediately with new solutions and services, consistent with their brand promises. But COVID has stretched their capabilities to deliver on that promise. At Jitterbit, we’re seeing challenger banks and other digital-first B2C businesses where integration issues are coming to a head and impacting their customer service, who are now just in constant firefighting mode without an accurate 360-degree view of the customer. As a result, they’re seeing more churn and also an uptick in negative customer reviews. Reviews can impact these challenger banks more than traditional banks precisely because the customer experience is one of the main ways they differentiate themselves. Suddenly, what was previously perceived internally as a small technical debt within the organisation – a few missing integrations, a manual process here and there to fill the gaps – has spiralled into a business-critical risk.”
Is it too late for challenger banks to adapt and seize the opportunities COVID-19 has brought digital-first companies?
“There’s a saying I like. The best time to plant a tree was twenty years ago. The next best time is today. Looking forward, we still don’t know what the full impact of COVID-19 will be or whether consumer behaviours will ever return to what we previously thought of as normal. The imperative for challenger banks however isn’t going to change – they must deliver a great customer experience and continue to innovate – otherwise they’re not challenger banks.”
In what ways would API adoption and integration / digital transformation move the needle forward for the financial services sector?
“McKinsey found that something like 70 per cent of digital transformations actually fail – not because of the technology but because of a lack of adoption within the company. In reality, digital transformation is about people. API adoption and seamless data integration ensure a company’s digital transformation is a success because it removes the need for complex, code-intensive technical integrations and instead makes transformation continuous and central to the way the company operates. The drivers for the business are, let’s say, to be able to fully utilize Salesforce, maybe a new ERP system or Workday in the HR space or whatever the key applications for that business happen to be. But the reality is that’s only going to work if you enable the APIs that these applications and platforms provide and put a low-to-no code integration platform behind them. It’s that integration piece which enables the data from these solutions to be managed and analysed in one place. Only when you get that whole business viewpoint can the ROI on those investments be fully realised and the power to transform unleashed.”
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