With 2021 Digital Scorecard, KPMG Urges Banks to Engage Customers with Digital Banking Channels

Emma Okonji

Relying on its 2021 Africa Digital Channels Scorecard report, KPMG Nigeria has stressed the need for retail banks in Nigeria to engage their customers with more digital banking channels that will boost customer experience in today’s digital era.

KPMG gave the advice at a recent webinar, where it launched its 2021 Africa Digital Channels Scorecard for Retail Banking.

The KPMG Digital Channels Scorecard unveils in-depth insights into the state of user experience on retail banks’ digital channels, and based its report on 12 retail user journeys, clustered into five journey groups in Nigeria, South Africa, Ghana, Kenya and Senegal, across four digital banking channels, namely Mobile banking, Internet banking, Unstructured Supplementary Service Data (USSD) banking, and Chat banking (Chatbot).

The report offered perspectives on how well the featured banks deliver on customer preferences, user experience design principles, and the adoption of emerging digital technologies, such as Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Analytics, to drive better engagement and experience differentiation in financial transactions.

The study employed KPMG’s Digital Channels UX Assessment Framework to evaluate and benchmark user experience across selected banks in five African counties, Nigeria inclusive.

The 2021 edition featured a selection of 26 banks many of whom have Pan-African footprints across the African continent. The banks surveyed are banks with a relatively large retail customer base in their respective countries and across Africa.

The report, which grouped its findings into five thematic areas: Digital Onboarding, Payments and Transfers, Digital Lending, Self-service and Customer Care, also segmented the banks into four distinct categories: Leaders, Challengers, Followers and Late Starters.

The report described leaders as those banks that understood the expectations of today’s customers and offer a wide range of capabilities across the various user journeys to facilitate a wholly digital interaction that meets customers’ expectations.

It described challengers as those banks that understood customers’ digital needs but failed to deliver a user experience that is engaging for the customers. It described followers as those banks that have limited capabilities on their digital channels to deliver digital interaction.

The report also described late starters as banks that are yet to deploy digital capabilities for user journeys on one or more channels.
The report findings however showed that only one bank out of the 26 surveyed banks across Africa, consistently appeared in the leaders category, while another five banks appeared in the leaders category for three anchor journeys.

The report said only six, which is approximately 25 per cent of the 26 banks surveyed, operate at the experience maturity levels demanded by the new generation of bank customers.

The report explained that the remaining 75 per cent has work to do, particularly on digital onboarding, self-service and customer care.

According to the report, “While few banks support end-to-end financial transactions, with easy and seamless onboarding process, majority of the banks surveyed do not have enough digital channels to engage new generation customers, and they have limited information for their product description, features and benefits and do not support unboarding and where they do, the services are often defective, thus indicating that such banks are yet to realise the importance of digital onboarding as a drive of customer acquisition and growth.”

Analysing the report, Partner and Lead, Digital Infrastructure at KPMG Africa, Mr. Boye Ademola, urged banks to engage customers more with the use of digital channels in onboarding their customers.

According to him, “One of the things that banks have done very well is on payments and transfers and they have invested so much in innovations for financial payments and transfers. We see banks using biometrics to authorise transactions for customers as well as management of failed transactions, but in the area of the digital leaders category, only few banks are investing in the onboarding of customers digitally and in leveraging technology to achieve such innovations.”

Giving details of the report, Associate Director, Data and Analytics at KPMG Kenya, Anastasia Kamande, advised banks to focus more on User Centre option in order to digitally onboard more bank customers.

According to her, “Only 34 per cent of Africans have bank accounts, and this calls for concern on all banks to digitise their banking processes, and create more digital channels for more customer engagements.”