Why customers prefer online banks: the experts’ views

By Gaia Lamperti

According to the Competition and Markets Authority report released earlier this week, traditional high street banks have been left behind by their online competitors for customer service standards during the pandemic. Among the top providers preferred in the UK figured digital banks  Monzo, First Direct and Starling Bank, the competition regulator’s report found.

This is the sixth publication that ranks the service quality of both personal and business current account providers in Great Britain and Northern Ireland. This was also the first full year of results to indicate how the pandemic impacted customer satisfaction with their banks.

“The past year has put financial pressure on many people and small businesses, and this is the first full set of results to reflect how banks have supported customers through this difficult period. If the service and quality offered by your bank has not been up to scratch, you may well be able to do better,” Adam Land, Senior Director at the CMA, said. “These results make it easy for people to see which banks are best meeting their customers’ needs at the click of a button, which puts pressure on poorly performing banks to raise their game.”

Indeed, results clearly show that customers shifted to online banks for their quality of service. Questions from the survey covered the quality of online and mobile provision, branch and overdraft services and, for small businesses, the quality of the relationship management they receive.

“It is no surprise to see that the born-digital challenger banks have come out on top in terms of customer service, with the last 18 months forcing consumers to conduct the majority of their banking online,” Michael Rennie, Banking Strategy Director at Mendix, a low-code software company, commented on the results.

“These challenger banks, such as Monzo and Starling, were set up for this environment and ready to serve customers through online channels. The modern world means that traditional banks need to be rolling out services faster than ever before. Financial institutions can only remain competitive if their software and applications are efficient and user-friendly. In the meantime, procuring top-level developers and having time and money to put into extensive projects are becoming increasingly challenging.”

The results also showed that new “disruptor” banks drove up competition between providers, resulting in new technologies being adopted and a better overall experience for the account holder

James Hirst, COO & Co-Founder at Tyk, a Cloud-native API management platform, shared his thoughts on this: “The global banking industry is witnessing the emergence of new, disruptive technology at a pace never seen before. Large consumer banks are now aware that huge change is underway, and they are quickly embracing new technologies in order to keep up with nimble challenger organisations.”

“For example, innovations such as Open Banking – fuelled by the use of APIs – are allowing consumer banks to enable third-party providers to use the financial data they hold to develop new products and services that improve customer’s daily lives,” Hirst continued.

“In practice, this means bank customers can now obtain account data quicker and easier than ever before via mobile apps, and partners of the bank are now able to request permission to access account details to power personal finance applications for budgeting, reporting and reconciliation tools. By responding to new technologies such as open banking and API management, large banks can deliver change quickly – allowing them to broaden their offering in response to customer demand. This will be crucial to market success as banks look to deliver innovation both now and in the future.”