Business (including the business of Banking, if you will) is as much a physical entity as any with mass. And as such, once set in motion, it undergoes the principles of kinetics.
In physics, the kinetic energy of an object is the energy that it possesses due to its motion. It is defined as the work needed to accelerate a body of a given mass from rest to its stated velocity. Having gained this energy during its acceleration, the body maintains this kinetic energy unless its speed changes.
Business Kinetics for a bank, once designed and set in motion, follows the same principle. Success demands that business, technology and operations work closely as a unified team, never leaving sight of end-customer focus. Designing memorable experiences are the bricks with which relationships are built. Empathy is the mortar that will cement relevance and ensure design is a sensory pleasure and makes better business sense. The digital age breathes immediacy into possibilities, but business success remains rooted in age-old first principles.
Customer centric design ensures the bank has a near permanent feed of customer preferences, likes, dislikes and extent of active engagement. This should ideally feedback into the products/services engineered and leveraged to build an enduring relationship with the customer. Besides customer lifetime value that accrues to the primary bank, monetisation opportunities will grow exponentially with premium relationship-based pricing.
Diving even deeper, beyond the rules of design or the forces of physics, is the fact that enduring relationships are actually based on chemistry. Naturally, stronger the ‘bond’, the stronger the relationship will be. This bond can only be strengthened when there is empathy for the customer and a powerful urge to service him better. But that is another topic – one on truly understanding your customer and his need.