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DIGITAL OMNICHANNEL FEATURE NAME
Picking apart the complexity of omnichannel
Isn’t omnichannel very easy to understand and execute? We have been talking about it for so long that it must be old digital news by now. Not for some, it seems
Senior Editor Bill Boyle
T
here are some who think that omnichannel just means making all your devices work across all your platforms without the customer seeing the joins. And they would be
correct. But it is becoming much more than that.
But as omnichannel is now beginning to permeate our digital lives and is now beginning to run in the background in banks, holding a myriad number of new banking services together, the banks and financial institutions are finding that there are fewer places to hide for the players not yet on the omnichannel bus.
Alexander Zwart, head of digital channels and CX at the digital transformation office at Dutch bank Rabobank, is quite clear about how vital omnichannel is. “As more and more customers use digital services, they are forcing us to change the way we operate, both with our partners and towards other parties,” he says. “The numbers of users are expanding but what is expanding exponentially are the numbers of channels the banks have to use to communicate with their partners, developers and customers. The numbers are so big that we couldn’t do it all ourselves, so we have to partner and make alliances.”
According to a recent Financial Times comment, Tencent, one of China’s duo of tech titans, said 768 million people sent and received hongbao, the red packets stuffed with cash, over Weixin Pay, its third-party payments business, during the six-day Chinese holiday period. Typically people will hand out scores or even hundreds of hongbao: according to Tencent, one man sent 2,723 while another received 3,429. The mass migration to digital hongbao – initiated four years ago by Tencent – highlights the explosion of making digital payments in China, where even beggars, according to the FT, accept alms by proffering a QR code to passers-by. The market was estimated to be worth $15.5 trillion last year, utterly dwarfing those in the US and other countries.
As more consumers use digital services, it is forcing banks to reassess the way they operate and the services they provide
Part of the market’s growth is due to poor legacy banking – China has mostly leap-frogged credit cards, for example – but has also been fuelled by innovations like moving hongbao online.
Tencent is looking to export the custom to other markets, including India where a customised version is available on Hike, its messaging app. And in 2016, 64 billion packets changed hands over Tencent’s payments platforms. Rival Alibaba is also challenging. This year Ant Financial, its payments affiliate, said more than 250 million users collected all the ‘five fortune cards’ in its New Year’s eve promotion. That is quite a feat of digital marketing.
www.ibsintelligence.com | © IBS Intelligence 2018
ipopba / iStock
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