Consumer-oriented services offered by traditional businesses like banks might seem like a long shot when evaluating ways to improve your company’s efficiency. While most technology-based ideas and new features for old kinds of transactions are certainly exciting and likely to generate considerable benefits for other enterprises and their customers, it remains a challenge to see how those things can help the companies that don’t own them.
However, when it comes to mobile banking, the value proposition is a little different. What benefits a company’s employees and vendors benefit the company, even if it is something as simple as saving time at the bank. Consider the average mid-sized organization’s payroll. Now multiply a five minute time savings by the number of employees. Then multiply that by the number of pay periods. If time is money, that calculus is a windfall for productivity. Here are some things to consider.
Communications
Bank customers used to have to be rather proactive about communicating with their bank. Getting news and critical warnings about their accounts and applications for new loans or lines of credit could be a time-consuming campaign of letters and phone calls punctuated by multiple visits to branches, appointments and other less-than-efficient processes. The same was true for management in nearly any business. In the modern era, all of those expensive options are replaced by things like e-mail, mobile banking and text messaging. Instead of a phone call placed by the customer, now the information can be delivered instantly by the bank before the customer even thinks about it. For regular customers, this is a nice convenience. For companies, it is a time-and-money-saving miracle.
Account Upgrades and Loans
The practical entirety of the retail bank business has been reduced to what can be displayed on a standard mobile phone screen. Everything from applying for loans from your phone to sophisticated financial transaction analysis and budgeting can be performed with a few taps from even the most generic mobile phone applications. This technology replaces the old system of gathering several executives and going through multi-page applications and supporting documentation for hours or days at a time. In the process, standardization has replaced the special case handling of the old system and has created an environment where the cost and the time investment are as efficient as they can be.
Card Management
The features and capabilities of modern enterprise debit and credit cards have to be seen to be believed. Some banks offer companies ways to track their usage transaction by transaction and to set limits based on geography, transaction type and even by the merchant. This has two effects. First, it dramatically enhances security for both companies and merchants. All involved parties can reliably trust transactions are genuine. They don’t have to invest additional time and money in security. Second, the super-record-keeping allows organizations to budget on a granular basis regardless of the number of cards or how large an area is being managed.
Saving time at the bank sounds great in television commercials, but for businesses, the money exchanged for time saved can be the difference between a profitable quarter and an earnings miss, and that can be the difference between growth and a setback in the stock price. That’s the measure of how important new bank technologies are.