Pegasystems Survey Reveals Banks Struggle to Meet Corporate Client Needs Across the Customer Lifecycle

SINGAPORE--(Marketwired - October 13, 2015) - Pegasystems Inc. (NASDAQ: PEGA), the software company empowering the world's leading enterprises with strategic business applications, today announced at Sibos 2015 the results of a new survey that shows banks lose a significant amount of corporate business due to slow and inefficient sales, onboarding, and customer service processes. The report reveals 78 percent of banks admit that poor service has cost them corporate business in the last 12 months, while nine of out 10 corporate banking clients say they would consider switching banks for the promise of better services.

As financial regulations evolve at a rapid pace, the expectations of unforgiving corporate banking clients continue to rise even in the face of this growing complexity. This new report, developed by Finextra, surveyed more than 100 banks and corporate banking clients around the world to pinpoint the major issues that are frustrating customers. The results uncover key opportunities for banks to improve the customer experience, retain existing customers, and attract new business. Among the key findings:

• Banks still take too long to onboard new clients: The survey reveals that, on average, banks still need four to five weeks to bring a new corporate customer on board. Expanding Know Your Customer (KYC) requirements sit at the root of this problem, as 88 percent of banks say KYC has a significant impact on onboarding times. Most banks admit their current KYC technology isn't flexible enough to handle rapidly changing regulations. This significantly hurts banks' ability to retain new clients and optimize the lifetime value of these customers.
• Customers lack visibility throughout the onboarding processes: Many corporate banking clients feel they are kept in the dark during the onboarding process and are frustrated by the lack of collaboration at the start of the relationship. Ninety percent of clients think that real-time visibility into onboarding status and self-service document submissions would bring a vast improvement to the process. Underscoring this point, only 21 percent of banks provide online collaboration tools that would allow customers to redline legal documentation with their banks to help accelerate the process.
• Lack of basic customer service drives clients to competitors: Poor customer service is driving corporate clients with increasing expectations to look for new banks that can meet their basic needs. The survey shows clients would switch if they could find a competing bank with better client service around onboarding, account maintenance, service requests, and inquiry handling.
• Banking salespeople need more access to data to provide the best offers: Many banking salespeople are siloed from vital data that can help them make the most relevant offers to their prospective clients. Fifty-six percent of banks admit their sales tools lack real-time connections to their customer data or visibility into existing client service, maintenance, or onboarding inquires. Corporate banking clients agree, as 50 percent say they are dissatisfied with banks' ability to show a consolidated view of their accounts within the bank.

Many banks admit they struggle to meet these challenges due to a lack of simple digital processes and holistic visibility into their clients' needs. Sixty-two percent of banks say they still need to manually route and assign work or rekey data several times over. In addition, another 62 percent of banks blame the lack of transparency into their clients' current status of open issues or inquires as a key reason for failure to meet their customers' basic needs.