CPaaS + fintech platforms: Accelerating digitalization in the finance industry
The expectations and demands of the average banking customer in 2023 has changed drastically over the years. They look for ease of use, security, and fast communication when interacting with banks and financial institutions. That means enterprises have had to adjust their communication strategies and capabilities to meet their users’ needs.
Banking enterprises are looking for fintech platforms that offer the technology they need to keep customer communication and transactions fast and simple.
Take Webio for example. They offer conversational AI to the credit and collections industry to simplify and accelerate communication between banking enterprises and their customers. Webio’s vision is a clear one:
We look after the hardest and most difficult of conversations that people have in their lifetime, and it’s all about money and being in financial difficulty, and we help those conversations be a little bit better for both them and our customers.
Cormac O’Neill
CEO at Webio
We sat down with Cormac O’Neill, the CEO and co-founder of Webio to find out what difficulties fintech organizations face today and how a CPaaS provider can help enable stronger and more efficient conversational experiences in the banking industry and ease difficult financial conversations for customers.
The main customer engagement challenge financial organizations face
Customers have moved on in terms of how they communicate with each other, and that has a huge impact on our customers as they must digitalize their contact strategy.
Cormac O’Neill
CEO at Webio
When it comes to customer communication, the banking and finance industry have made major changes to keep up with user expectations. As digitalization quickly became the norm for customers, banking institutions have had to evolve with new communication demands in order to stay relevant and build a reputation as a reliable service provider.
Digitalization has become the greatest expectation of end-users and in turn the greatest challenge for banks and financial organizations.
Traditionally the financial industry relied heavily on voice, email, and even letters and now they’re having to switch to communicating with customers across digital channels. Having the technology that will enable digital communications is a challenge for them.
Cormac O’Neill
CEO at Webio
Fintech platforms are then riddled with how to provide the best and simplest solution to deliver digitalization to their customers to ease this challenge for them.
CPaaS capabilities are critical for fintech platforms
Since end-users are looking for the easiest and most convenient way to communicate with their banks, fintech platforms need to be equipped with digital channels and CPaaS capabilities to empower enterprises with the best customer engagement solution.
The credit and collections industry deals with many high-stress and complex use cases. Offering a range of channels and conversational AI enables Webio to offer their customers the most robust and reliable solution to simplify these use cases and offer the best experiences to end-users.
Webio is in digital customer engagement, so omnichannel capabilities are just critical. As a solution provider, if you cannot provide access to all messaging channels, you simply cannot provide a proper service to your customers.
Cormac O’Neill
CEO at Webio
But is having a full portfolio of channels and messaging apps enough to meet the needs of fintech platforms? Not necessarily.
Having a reliable and robust CPaaS platform will enable businesses to scale communication, go-to-market faster, and offer secure messaging – helping brands get the most out of their messaging channels.
What to look for in a CPaaS provider
We’ve established that having all messaging apps available in one place is crucial, but there are a few more capabilities Webio sees as essential when choosing the right CPaaS provider:
- Reliability: Banks need to be certain that their messages are being delivered to customers, so finding a provider with high deliverability and intelligent routing options is a must
- Security: Safeguarding communication between enterprises and their customers is important to establish a reputation as a reliable financial service provider. Look for a platform that prioritizes compliancy, message security and privacy, and is well equipped against fraudulent activity.
- Industry knowledge: Your CPaaS provider should know your business and industry inside and out to be capable of providing you with the best solution for your challenges.
- Support: It’s inevitable that sometimes, things don’t go as planned. Your CPaaS provider should offer always-on support to tackle issues immediately and provide you with peace of mind that you won’t be left to resolve complicated issues alone.
Infobip provides a premium service, which is key in terms of access to messaging apps and the messaging across those apps being premium.
But the main reason we chose Infobip is two-fold. First, the team at Infobip are really knowledgeable in their area and understood the challenges that we and our customers had, which was impressive. Second, the support we were given and interactions with the Infobip team gave us a comfort blanket that if things go wrong, Infobip will be there to meet those challenges.
Cormac O’Neill
CEO at Webio
The future of fintech customer engagement
CPaaS providers and fintech platforms like Infobip and Webio are major contributors to the digitalization of the banking industry, helping accelerate the adoption digital conversational experiences for enterprises. But what will digital customer engagement look like in five years?
I think you’re going to see this idea of enterprises and companies knowing why their customers are reaching out and contacting them and being able to proactively answer and take care of the queries that they have. That is going to be driven by data and machine learning and it’s going to play a huge role in customer engagement- we are only at the start of that journey.
Cormac O’Neill
CEO at Webio
An AI driven conversational cloud solution is opening the door for this idea. It enables businesses to create custom journeys using set messaging templates for common use cases. The AI will then analyze conversations users have with your businesses and provide you with rich data that can be used for their users with ready-to-use templates and AI generated solutions based on their customer data.
The next generation of CPaaS
CPaaS providers and fintech platforms, like Infobip and Webio, work together to accelerate the digitalization of the financial industry and elevate conversational experiences for customers. But to really make an impact, we have to enable brands to tailor, test, and deploy conversational experiences faster than you can tap your credit card to make a purchase.
As a leading CPaaS provider, we are constantly evolving our solutions to ensure platforms are able to provide the best-in-class technology to their banking and finance clients, and in turn better experiences for end-users. Digitalizing the entire communication ecosystem is the way to achieve this.
We worked with platforms to develop the next generation of CPaaS, to speed up automation and digitalize their communication, which includes:
- A unified API that allows platforms to manage all channels in one place
- Granular reporting on all their customers
- Faster time to market
Find out what Cormac O’Neill’s first impressions were when learning about CPaaS X, and what it could mean for the future of platforms:
Discover a full suite of CPaaS and conversational solutions to enhance your communication strategy
