The Coronavirus crisis has changed the banking industry, fast-tracking the development of digital channels, according to Deloitte.

The consultancy firm’s fourth Digital Banking Maturity 2020 report - which claims to be largest global benchmarking of digital retail banking channels - found that 60 per cent of banks have closed or shortened opening hours of branches – but many have also implemented new digital features.

These include fully digital processes like account opening (34 per cent), remote identification or verification (23 per cent) and contactless payments (18 per cent).

Such new functionalities typically gain traction faster with challenger banks than incumbents. For instance, bill splitting tools are 27 per cent for challengers versus two per cent of incumbents, virtual debit card 26 per cent vs two per cent, chatbots with advanced use cases 15 per cent vs four per cent, and chatbots allowing transactionality 12 per cent vs two per cent.

What Deloitte calls ‘digital champions’ were found to be investing in end-to-end digital sales processes and have widened their lead on latecomers for key products – 51 per cent vs 23 per cent for current accounts, 85 per cent vs 34 per cent for credit cards, and 84 per cent vs 30 per cent for cash loans.

“Digital champions don’t only lead their peers in number of digital functionalities along the customer journey, those that are incumbents outperform other incumbents in their country on average on both,” read the report.

It stated that 65 per cent of digital champions ranked in the top 10 per cent for analysed user experience scenarios. The largest gaps between ‘champions’ and ‘latecomers’ were in opening an account - 71 per cent vs 23 per cent - buying an insurance product - 44 per cent vs seven per cent - and beyond banking service - 48 per cent vs 11 per cent.

Deloitte analysed digital retail banking channels of 318 banks from 39 countries. It carried out analysis of 1,108 digital functionalities through ‘mystery shopper’ approach on real retail current accounts in each bank.

There was also a survey of 4,900 customers, focused on identifying 26 most important banking activities and preferred channels (branch, internet, mobile), with a study analysing customers perception of user experience.

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