Africa’s leading auditing and tax advisory firm, KPMG, has launched its Digital Channels Scorecard for 2021 on how well banks delivered on customer preferences, user experience design principles, and the adoption of emerging digital technologies such as AI & analytics to drive better engagement and experience differentiation.
The KPMG Digital Channels Scorecard unveils in-depth insights into the state of user experience on retail banks’ digital channels. This report was based on the review and benchmark of 12 retail user journeys (clustered into five journey groups) across four digital banking channels – mobile banking, Internet banking, USSD banking and chat banking.
The study employed KPMG’s Digital Channels UX Assessment Framework to evaluate and benchmark user experience across the selected banks.
The evaluation leveraged the mystery shopper approach, whereby evaluators accessed the banking channels and attempted to perform different activities along the selected journeys as any regular customer would.
This edition featured a selection of 26 banks, many of whom have Pan-African footprints across the continent.
The banks featured are those with a relatively large retail customer base in the respective countries, and indeed across Africa – including Absa Bank, Consolidated Bank of Ghana, Stanbic Bank, Ecobank and GCB Bank among others.
Giving a little detail on the report, Partner and Lead, Digital Transformation-KPMG Africa, Boye Ademola, noted that out of the 26 banks surveyed, six of them were in the leadership category.
“When we look at the 26 banks, those doing very strongly in this area we call them the Leaders; and then, we have the Challengers that are quite close to the Leaders; and we have the Followers and the Late Starters. Generally, we found about 6 banks across the continent to be in the leadership category, and the remaining 20 banks will be around the followers, late starter categories.
“This also shows us there is still considerable work that the banks really need to do in ensuring they are at par with expectations of today’s consumers.
“When we looked at the 26 banks around the continent, we found out that the strong players are in different jurisdictions; and leadership is not really concerned primarily about whether they are from West, East or South Africa,” he said.
Launching the 2021 KPMG Digital Channels Scorecard, Partner Risk Consulting-KPMG Ghana, Andrew Akoto, advised banks to take the customer journey very seriously and pay attention to the user experience to ensure growth.
“It is important to take the customer journey very seriously, given the digital imperative imposed on it – not only by the pandemic, but also the emergence of digital natives. It becomes important that whether it is digital lending, onboarding, self-service customer care, banks should pay attention to enhancing the user experience, which will make them competitive and, of course, grow their customer base,” he said.
