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The Bottom Line

Knowledge is power and most bankers have figured out that they’re sitting on a treasure trove of information about the consumers and businesses they serve.  However, using this information to empower their account holders and deliver services tailored to their needs has been a difficult goal for banks and credit unions to achieve. 

One of the many changes brought by COVID-19 was an acceleration in the participation of the delivery economy.  This level of participation is likely to continue to rise as more businesses develop viable online ordering and delivery offerings.  Companies such as Amazon, Google, and Apple have made personalization of offers and the anticipation of the consumers’ needs prerequisites to any successful online engagement.  So, as the delivery economy expands, successful offerings will need to reflect these same characteristics delivering the convenience and speed consumers now consider mandatory as a basis for loyalty. 

In 2018, SRM expanded its operations to Ireland, the United Kingdom, and Europe. This division of our firm, known as SRM Europe (srmeurope.com), services a diverse set of industries, including financial services, music entertainment, food retailing, and architecture. While these are different markets, all have been affected by the pandemic and reports across these varied verticals virtually tell the same story.

The overarching message is that organizations, of all types, need to successfully adapt to change. As we’ve recently experienced, change happens, regardless of one’s level of preparedness. However, organizations often shy away from changing course, even after the tides have shifted. As change is the only constant businesses can rely upon, a culture of adaptability, clear communications, and good relationships will help ready any organization for the challenges ahead.

In mid-March, when Americans were beginning to absorb the notion of shelter-in-place orders, SRM reached out to our financial institution clients to get a snapshot of their mindset regarding approaches to meeting consumer needs in the age of the pandemic. The findings of that initial survey can be found here. 

To refresh this view and learn how time in the “now normal” was impacting banks and credit unions, a second survey was planned in late June. Of course, by the time the second survey was ready to go into the field, COVID-19 was re-asserting itself across the United States. We retooled the study to accommodate the circumstances, revisiting some of the questions from the March survey and drilling down into digital transformation and payments.  

Given the whirlwind of recent events, it seems like ages since January, when one of our payments experts Larry Pruss weighed in on Visa’s acquisition of Plaid, API aggregator for P2P players such as Venmo. He discussed what this combination could mean for banks and credit unions going forward, reinforcing two key points:  

1. Financial institutions are hungry for objective expert opinions on market developments; and 
2. The strategic moves of major industry vendors – not just their direct competitors – can have a major impact on their competitive position.     

Delinquencies & Defaults Brewing on the Horizon 

Despite the many uncertainties in our “now” normal, Covid-19 is undeniably changing consumer spending patterns – and it shows. According to its 8-K filing from June 1, which compares May 2019 to May 2020 payment volumes, Visa’s cardholder spend in categories like travel, entertainment, fuel and restaurants had 20-40%+ declines year-over-year, while spend in categories such as groceries, home improvement, retail sales and telecom/utilities grew 20-40% for the same period.      

In the months since the pandemic was announced, SRM’s experts have weighed in on the operational impacts of COVID-19. We also gathered perspectives from a cross-section of banks and credit unions through a survey conducted in the early days of shelter-in-place orders (results from survey 2 coming soon). Now that the bills have come due for April and May, we noticed some unusual emerging trends in the invoice tracking data.

For years, small businesses have gotten very little help from their financial institutions – and no market segment gets a pass on this one. From mega-nationals to community-sized institutions, small businesses have seldom found the assistance they need. Instead, many institutions have either pushed them to retail accounts or offered these small business owners treasury/commercial services.  

While community bankers were already weighing options on core processing and digital solution strategies before the pandemic, these decisions weigh heavily enough now to quickly tip the scales of survival. We’ve already shared our thoughts on how the “shelter in place” environment and its aftermath gave a serious jolt to any bank or credit union leader still on the fence about the importance of a robust digital backbone. 

In our last blog post, several SRM experts weighed in on the future of banking in the now normal - how consumer spending behaviors would influence branch operations and non-interest lines of revenue. In this post, we will shift our focus to big data, cyber risks and the need to reinforce legacy infrastructure.   

We are spending a lot of time thinking through the near- and mid-term ramifications of the coronavirus pandemic, especially impacts to the financial services industry. SRM has already shared several perspectives on this topic, including similarities/differences between today’s downturn to 2008’s financial crisis and financial institutions’ latest wake-up call concerning digital channels. Now, our lens focuses on what adapting to post-pandemic consumer banking and spending behaviors might look like.