A financial services website that doesn’t cost your sanity
How a global financial services company added value to its websites beyond compliance
The situation
If you’ve visited one of the world’s great old cities, chances are you didn’t do much digging for sewer lines, power cables, or water mains. If you did, you’d see that it’s a hot mess down there, with generations of different systems somehow patched together, yet somehow getting things done.
This was the situation a global financial services company found itself in with its customer identity and access management systems (CIAM). The company’s growth over the years had created a crazy quilt of different systems which, though working, were starting to affect the customer experience. To wit: its websites.
Each geography had its own site with its own account registration process and authentication technology; each looked different, and sometimes required different sets of credentials for different digital channels. Adding to the complexity: local regulations for managing customer profiles and preferences (hint: they were different).
The lack of website consistency was, in a word, onerous -- both to customers and company. With a cluster of patched-together inefficiencies like this, how could the company continue to build a global brand?
It was time to create a simple, secure, and unified experience -- not just to bring the customer experience up to snuff, or to meet risk management or compliance. No. An effective CIAM system could add value to the business, too. If the company’s business units shared access to customer information, then a customer could easily add a new policy without having to start an entirely new origination and underwriting process. And if different subsidiaries shared a single login and authentication system—instead of each building their own—they’d save both time and money. Win, win, win. And cue Deloitte.
Win-win scenarios are great. But why settle?
The solve
Deloitte’s CIAM services were designed specifically to wrangle these kinds of disjointed processes and redundant data into a secure, streamlined customer experience, and we proposed a three-country pilot to test it. The pilot would work on a design principle of build-once-deploy-to-many, while maintaining the unique requirements of both the company’s various business units and of its culturally diverse customers.
To be shared across geographies:
user management. We started by creating centralized, data-rich customer profiles to provide a single source of truth across the company; this unified view of the customer would remove data silos and duplicate data, improve analytic fidelity, and simplify data privacy compliance. Also shared around the world: multi-factor authentication, a doubling down on verifying user identity.
Definitely not shared everywhere in the same way:
How customers would experience their online sessions. Because while many of them would expect something secure and frictionless (and would get it, thanks to the same underlying infrastructure), they'd maybe not all have the same expectations for how that experience would be delivered. No frills? Lots of frills? Our CIAM services could be configured to suit.
Simple is never easy. But it sure makes customers happy.
The impact
The company went live with its pilot in three countries in just three weeks, with participants offering their clients a dramatically streamlined customer experience.
The pilot’s success has attracted other business units eager for a more modern, stable, and cost-effective take on CIAM as a service -- one that maintains a relevant, authentic customer experience. To that end, the company has already used CIAM services to replace multiple legacy platforms, with an additional 70+ websites transitioning by the end of 2022 – both providing customers with two-factor authentication and satisfying regulatory requirements.
Global financial services are complex. The customer experience needn’t be.
Anish Srivastava
