Rethink the Small Business Owner Customer Journey [eBook]
“If you can enable businesses to spend less time banking, that’s the goal for the whole FinTech industry,” says Luka Ivicevic, who co-founded Penta Bank to improve the customer experience of Small Business Owners (SBOs). With so much disruption in financial services, and a wealth of new competitors entering the market, it has never been more important for providers to focus on crafting the best possible customer journey in order to stand out from the crowd.
So what does a great customer journey look like, and how do you market this?
At our recent webinar, ‘SMEs Disrupted: Lessons You Need to Learn to Improve the Customer Journey,’ a panel of experts considered the best experiences in an SBO customer journey and discussed how these could be most effectively marketed. We have developed an eBook ‘Rethink the Small Business Owner Customer Journey’ which captures the key insights from the webinar and examines the pain points of SBOs, investigates the impact of technology and regulation and considers how innovative companies are helping give customers their lives back. Contributors include:
- David Brear, CEO, 11:FS
- Sigridur Sigurdardottir, Managing Director, Chief Customer and Innovation Officer UK, Santander
- Pete Steger, Head of Business Development, Kabbage
- Luka Ivicevic, Co-Founder & Head of Growth, Penta Bank
- George Bevis, Founder & CEO, Tide
We know that small business banking sits at the heart of growing regulatory pressures and new technologies. But how are incumbents and FinTechs reacting to these changes? “The next wave of innovation in business banking is likely to come from companies who are exploiting regulatory change and the emergence of white label banking service providers,” says Tide's Bevis. Tide’s five minute sign-up is significant, says Bevis, but it is not likely to be a long-term strategic differentiator. “I expect that other organizations will try to copy it over the next few years.”
SBOs are passionate about their craft and that’s how they want to spend the majority of their time. As a result, they want their customer journey to help their work/life balance, empower them to build a better business and for their business banking to be uncomplicated and stress free.
For Banco Santander’s Sigurdardottir, it’s about enabling small businesses to save time and give them the control they need to run their business. “What we need to do is deliver something that is simple, seamless and frictionless.” So how do providers attract new SME customers? Delivering services through their channel of choice is fundamental, says Sigurdardottir. “Mobile continues to become more important in terms of digitalizing that journey and providing speed into the system.”
Business banking is not great today, according to Ivicevic, and there are many better options out there. Penta’s strategy is to attract high-tech start-ups that recognize this. “You shouldn’t be doing your banking for hours and hours a week. It should be similar to booking an Airbnb or ordering your Uber. It comes down to targeting those who believe in this mentality and who are essentially early adopters.”
The perception held by SBOs also continues to be a challenge. Pete Steger from Kabbage finds “one in four small businesses are aware of Kabbage, but the majority of entrepreneurs still look to banks first when they need funding. Our focus is on continuing to make dramatic improvements to the customer journey to make automated lending the standard for customers and the organizations that serve them.” This is where partnerships with incumbents can succeed in creating “operating efficiencies but also seamless experiences for customers” adds Steger.
To learn more from these contributors, download ‘Rethink the Small Business Owner Customer Journey’ now and start your own journey towards more successful SBO marketing.