Bridgeforce 2018 Trends Forecast

Looking to the next 12 months, we see the industry likely continuing to: expand efforts to meet aggressive growth plans and customer preferences; further manage the new age of fraud; better optimize profitability and reduce credit losses; and lastly, harden existing risk/compliance investments and automate more routine testing and validation processes.

Top Trends:

1) Data Protection & Management

• Enabling customers and providers to access the open market more easily and compete on a more level playing field allowing new players to access customer details and onboard them much quicker.
• Increasing data quality testing, sharing internally and at a consortium level across industries.
• Increasing use of machine learning and biometrics to help combat fraud with better methods of customer authentication.

2) Digital & Mobile Enablement

• Creating an end-to-end customer journey optimization to digitally enable and/or automate primary acquisition and servicing needs.
• Shifting the role of employees to support escalations versus standard requests, and become power users via shared experiences.
• Further Robo-advisory for Financial Wellness and Product Advisory testing to reduce compliance risks and support growth needs.

3) Process Simplification

• Implementing and leveraging technology to remove manual tasks, re-invest capacity in value-adding activities, reduce expenses, error rates and provide more consistent outcomes for customers across the end-to-end journey.

4) Technology & Operations Alignment

• Re-aligning technology and operations teams under one leader/team as IT and strategic operations goals and objectives begin to merge.

5) Remediation Formalization

• Formalizing remediation processes and documentation and establishing remediation teams for internal/external audits as well as regulatory examinations to ensure consistency and continuous improvement in these efforts.