With digital banking now a necessity, many banks have made large investments in their consumer-facing apps and websites. Along with enhanced security, the goal is almost always to improve the user experience, commonly referred to as UX. This emphasis on high-quality UX has led to intuitive designs, innovative features and pleasing aesthetics for digital banking platforms. Unfortunately, this is not the case with many legacy banking systems.
Over the last 20 years, we’ve consistently heard from bankers who are frustrated by the clunky, outdated nature of their software systems. The consensus is that they’re hard to use, aren’t intuitive and simply aren’t designed for the needs of modern banking. Here’s why you should start treating employees like customers and invest in better UX for your bank management systems.
Lost productivity
The biggest problem with bad UX in employee-facing systems is a loss of productivity. When you use a poorly designed system, something that should take two or three clicks can instead take 10 clicks and multiple screens. A 10-second process can now take more than a minute. If you add that up over days, weeks or even years, it’s easy to see how big of an impact bad UX can have on productivity. By upgrading your system to a platform with better UX, employees can work faster, accomplish more and ultimately produce better results for your bank.
Increased risk
Because core banking systems are often so difficult to use, bankers tend to avoid them or only use them as a last resort. Instead, they’ll often turn to spreadsheets or other manual processes to manage their work. But spreadsheets come with their own set of problems. Among other things, they aren’t automatically updated, can easily become corrupted or deleted, and are subject to copy/paste errors. This means stakeholders could be making decisions based on incomplete or outdated data, putting your bank’s future in jeopardy.
There are other problems that can increase risk as well. If credit administrators can’t easily see all pertinent information about a loan in one place, they are more likely to miss important risk indicators. In situations like these, high-quality UX becomes more than a trendy buzzword. It becomes a real solution for mitigating risk for your bank.
Frustrated employees
Poorly designed banking software can create real frustration for those employees who live in these systems every day. The slow, tedious processes can take a toll on an employee’s psyche and negatively impact their job satisfaction. More than once, we’ve heard from bankers who have left a bank due in part to their frustration with difficult systems. Higher turnover rates create disruption in your operation and will inevitably prove costly to your organization.
Good UX, on the other hand, leads to happy employees, and happy employees are more productive and more likely to remain loyal to the bank. This has a ripple effect on your company culture, helping you cultivate an environment where people actually want to work. Investing in better systems shows employees that you value their efforts and can help improve retention while making everyone’s job a little bit more enjoyable.
Great UX isn’t easy. It’s both art and science. It’s about simplicity, visual appeal and an intuitive process. And it’s not as simple as adding new screens on top of a legacy core. To truly make a system user friendly, you need to consider UX from the earliest stages of the system’s design. The architects of these systems need to understand how bankers work, what they need and what will make their lives easier. By using a software solution designed and built by people who have real experience in the banking industry, you can start delivering a better user experience for your employees and produce significant benefits for your organization.
Want to empower your employees with a system they’ll actually enjoy using? Contact BankPoint or schedule a demo to see how our powerful bank management software, designed by banking experts, can help your team do its best work.
