4 ways to level up your digital banking

Executive Summary:

Financial institutions can rapidly improve digital engagement and retention by adding four high impact enhancements to their digital banking experience: integrated video chat, bi directional account aggregation, advanced analytics, and scalable SMB tools. These upgrades reduce friction, increase adoption, and position banks and credit unions as their accountholders’ financial hub.

Key Takeaways

• Integrated video chat, aggregation, and analytics strengthen relationships, speed resolution, and create new revenue opportunities.
• Scalable business banking delivers invoicing, payment acceptance, and fraud secure communication to win and retain SMBs.

In a world where more people use fintech than social media, it’s essential your digital banking experience keeps up with expectations.

Here are four things you can do today to enhance your accountholder experience:

1. in-app video chat and screen sharing

The inclusion of authenticated and augmented chat within digital banking is essential.

When you empower your accountholders with the ability to contact you in their exact moments of need – from any device at any time – you’re successfully increasing engagement and speeding time to resolution.

To further augment your accountholder’s experience, you can integrate video chat and screen sharing capabilities. The benefits?

• Video chat and screen sharing help your support staff resolve issues faster. When accountholders have trouble explaining their problem, support agents can get to the root of the problem faster through screen sharing, which provides a visual understanding of what’s happening.
• Accountholders are more satisfied with live video chats. A video-based interaction can foster trust and build relationships more effectively during a problem-solving scenario. In fact, 69% of consumers using live video chat say it is better than interacting with staff at a branch.¹
• Integrated video chat removes frustrations. 75% of consumers rank long waiting times as a major customer service frustration.² And despite years of investment and effort, just 13% of companies said customer data, history, and context carry over fully across interactions and channels.³ When video chat is integrated into existing support conversations, support representatives enter the call with a full understanding of what’s already been shared, easing the burden and frustrations of your accountholder right from the start.

Using a video chat and screen sharing solution that’s baked into your digital banking platform – like Banno Conversations™ – rather than bolted on as a third-party add-in provides additional benefits. For instance:

• Your service reps control the timing of video calls. Rather than keeping support representatives on standby or leaving accountholders in a queue while a call center or support team handles other issues, initiating a video call through Banno Conversations happens on the support agent’s side after an agreed-upon time has been established. This gives agents time for additional research, controls workflows, and provides your accountholders with the opportunity to choose the time and place for the video call.
• Integrated information removes complexity. When video chat is built into your existing chat platform, your service representatives can access all the information they need from a single back-office tool rather than logging into multiple solutions.
• Cross-sales are more natural and effective. When answering complicated questions or solving tricky technical issues face-to-face, it’s easier for your support teams to suggest additional services or technology that would benefit your accountholders in their moment of need.

With video chat and screen sharing in place, you’ll be prepared to meet your accountholders’ expectations with another powerful tool in your sales and service toolkit.

2. bi-directional account aggregation

Financial fragmentation has become increasingly prevalent in today’s world.

In fact, today’s North American consumer has an average of seven financial services products, and six in ten (59%) consumers acquired a financial services product from a new provider in the past 12 months.⁴

Due to this fragmentation, accountholders have a complicated relationship with their money – struggling to see their complete financial picture. This challenge extends to traditional banks and credit unions as well, who no longer have a clear picture of their accountholders’ financial lives – losing the ability to present relevant offers or provide personalized guidance.

The solution to this fragmentation lies in your ability to provide bi-directional aggregation; helping your accountholders securely connect their accounts to third-party fintech providers as needed. Even more importantly, you can empower your accountholders to aggregate data from their external accounts into your main digital banking experience.

This external aggregation enables you to become the financial hub for your accountholders – from which the individual or business can interact with the broader financial landscape.

It’s a win on many levels:

• Your digital banking app becomes a single source of truth for your accountholders. Rather than having to log into multiple apps, your app becomes their go-to hub for all things finance-related.
• Your accountholders gain deeper insight into their finances. As transactions (including those aggregated through externally linked accounts) are run through transaction enrichment, it becomes possible to categorize activity and make informed plans and decisions.
• You can gain a window into your accountholders’ financial lives. With aggregation capabilities, you can now see what your accountholders are doing across all aspects of their financial lives.
• New revenue opportunities emerge. Knowing what your accountholders are doing with other financial services providers creates opportunity. You can decide how much (or how little) to use this data to compete for business or make better and more informed recommendations to your accountholders.

Offering your accountholders full financial visibility within your digital banking experience – a feature available in the Banno Digital Platform™ – provides a secure, 360-degree view of their finances in one place rather than relegating these aggregation capabilities to a separate Personal Financial Management (PFM) suite accessed by single sign-on.

With this functionality in place through an affordable solution that’s powered by Jack Henry’s expanded relationship with Mastercard® and Finicity, you have the ability to see how your accountholders are interacting with their financial ecosystem and can become the hub of their financial universe.

Aggregation gives your accountholders a complete view of their finances — and with Jack Henry™ Rapid Transfers, they can now move funds between their own internal and external accounts quickly and securely. This helps your accountholders manage cash flow, avoid fees, and simplify financial management - all within your digital banking experience.

3. advanced analytics and reporting

Do you track app downloads and the number of digital banking sessions per week or per month for your accountholders? While this is an easy way to spot macro growth trends or usage data, when it comes to knowing exactly what your accountholders do once they’re logged into their digital banking platform – there’s often a gaping hole.

Given most users check their balance or look for a specific transaction and then log off, it’s especially important to know how your accountholders are interacting with anything beyond those basic screens.

This is where advanced analytics come into play.

Advanced analytics captures event-based data within your digital banking platform. With this information in hand, you have the insights needed to grow your revenue.

Consider these use cases:

• Develop onboarding and track your new user’s digital banking journey. In your digital banking onboarding plan, incentivize your users to complete particularly “sticky” activities like setting up an automatic transfer, using P2P, or adding their first payee in the bill payment system. With advanced analytics, you can track and reward their progress while also sending nudges to revisit incomplete activities to help increase service adoption.
• Identify points of friction that signal a problem. Are your accountholders regularly starting a task but abandoning it before completion? Keeping tabs on whether your users are leaving your app with unfinished tasks can help you pinpoint areas of opportunity, discover if you’re adding too much friction to a process, or show that your workflow needs to be adjusted.
• Create targeted marketing campaigns. Identify your top priorities for service adoption within the app. Whether that’s digital invoicing, bill payment, P2P, eStatements, or something else, advanced analytics can help you identify active users who are likely to adopt those services. Once identified, you can upload any list into your in-app marketing platform (like Banno Marketing™) and create a targeted campaign – empowering you to reach the right accountholders at the right time.

With new data and user insights at your fingertips, you can position your institution to define new revenue opportunities while improving adoption and engagement with your digital banking experience.

4. scalable business banking

In the contest for valuable business banking relationships, community and regional financial institutions have some built-in advantages.

You know your communities intimately. Your employees are well known in the marketplace, and you understand the unique challenges that local businesses face – and how to address them.

Unfortunately, those factors aren’t leading you to capture your fair share of business banking accounts.

In fact, only 23% of small to mid-sized businesses (SMBs) use a local bank or credit union as their primary financial institution. 66% selected a national or regional bank - citing a better digital banking platform as a top factor in their decision.⁵

So, how can you capture these valuable business relationships? By upping your digital game.

• Offer a platform tailored to growing businesses. 86% of small employer firms and 94% of non-employer firms report using personal credit scores to obtain financing.⁶ This implies it’s easier for new businesses to launch using the personal finances of their founders – making it essential for you to create a digital banking continuum.

  By doing so, you can enable microbusinesses and gig economy workers to use the digital banking tools they’re comfortable with on day one, while providing the option to toggle on additional features and capabilities as their business grows.

  It’s a strategy delivered by Jack Henry’s digital banking suite that includes the Banno Digital Platform™ and Banno Business™. With the flip of a switch, your back-office support staff can enable business-centric features like Tap2Local™ for contactless payment acceptance, ACH, Wire Transfers, and Check Positive Pay – giving businesses the powerful tools that they need to manage business banking accounts through a familiar digital interface.

• Include invoicing and payment acceptance. Third-party, non-bank fintechs continue to capture market share among SMBs looking for ways to simplify their invoicing and payment acceptance processes. In fact, 92% of small businesses in the U.S. have indicated they’re interested in using fintech tools for billing, invoicing, and payment acceptance.⁷

  Third‑party fintechs increasingly intercept and hold payment flows that once passed directly through primary financial institutions. Recent Federal Reserve research shows rapid growth in alternative payment methods and rising consumer and business balances held at nonbank providers — with half of U.S. consumers now maintaining funds at nonbank platforms.⁸ Offering tools for billing, invoicing, and payment acceptance within your digital banking experience not only prevents additional financial fragmentation by serving your business clients in-house, but provides a boost to your balance sheet, too.

  It’s one of the reasons Banno Business has baked Autobooks digital invoicing and online payment acceptance tools directly into the digital banking platform. Rather than sending your accountholders to third-party providers, accountholders can send digital invoices and collect payments directly within their digital experience. With Tap2Local, accountholders can now accept contactless payments directly from their mobile device, without the need for additional dongles or hardware. Seamless integration with popular accounting tools simplifies reconciliation - making your digital banking platform a centralized hub for small business banking.

• Fraud prevention. Often less technology-savvy than larger corporations, SMBs can easily fall prey to today’s fraudsters. Business email compromise (BEC) is especially challenging, since email remains the most common tool for business communications.

  In fact, BEC attacks have cost more than $2.7 billion in 2024, according to the FBI’s Internet Crime Report.⁹

  It’s an expensive problem.

  That’s why Banno Business includes Conversations for Business™, a built-in solution to BEC. This secure communication tool takes financial conversations and approvals out of email or SMS texts and into an authenticated experience. These capabilities allow highstakes financial transactions like wires and ACHs to be securely discussed within the digital banking app – and from any desktop or mobile device – making it easy to conduct legitimate financial business while keeping fraudsters away.

• Personal Communication via the Business Channel. Beyond preventing fraud, an in-app, secure communication tool like Conversations for Business will ensure the high touch service you’re known for is available through the SMB’s preferred methods of contact: online and mobile banking.

  With this powerful piece of embedded technology, you can easily offer businesses a digital service continuum that includes options like authenticated and augmented chat, secure file sharing, video chat, and screen sharing.

  Conversations for Business also allows accountholders to ask questions or submit forms or applications at their convenience while offering your business accountholders the opportunity to provide context to an inquiry by attaching a particular account, transaction, or form. This helps speed time from the initial inquiry to resolution – freeing the business owners to focus on what they do best – running their businesses.

The personal touch and powerful knowledge your business bankers, lenders, and officers bring to interactions with your business accountholders pay off.

Businesses that identify a community bank or credit union as their primary financial institution consistently report higher satisfaction and stronger loyalty than those banking with larger institutions. Recent findings from the ACSI Finance Study 2023– 2024 show that community banks outperform big banks across core experience metrics, with customer service scoring as high as 92 for staff courtesy and 89 for in‑branch transaction speed— levels that far exceed those of large national institutions.¹⁰

Including a best-in-breed digital solution like Banno Business in your business banking delivery strategy is critical to your success.

Beyond serving today’s business accountholders well, you’ll have the technology you need to attract and retain new SMBs, bolster your bottom line, diversify your portfolio, deliver new deposits, and uncover new lending opportunities that simultaneously build your community.

the time to start is now

As new third-party fintechs and digitally savvy neobanks continue to gobble up market share and take aim at your accountholders, now is the time to improve your digital banking experience by adding one or more of these important enhancements.

At Jack Henry™, we want to make it as easy as possible to connect you to modern technology solutions that make a difference.

Contact us today to discover how you can deploy:

• Video chat and screen sharing
• External account aggregation
• Advanced analytics and reporting
• A scalable digital banking platform for businesses