Markaz: Accelerating Digital Readiness in GCC Banks imposes the need for periodic evaluation to adopt effective strategies

Kuwait Financial Centre 'Markaz' has released through its research arm, Marmore MENA Intelligence, a new report titled 'GCC Banks - Making them Digitally Ready'. The report addresses multiple aspects of digital readiness of banks in the GCC region. It provides key insights on how top banks in GCC fare in terms of their digital presence on various customer touchpoints such as website, mobile apps and social media. The report discusses the important metrics that indicate the strength of a bank's digital presence and how to effectively leverage them to enhance consumer engagement and experience.

Banks in GCC are catching up on the COVID-19 spurred digitalization trend and are racing to innovate and differentiate. They are coming out with many end-to-end digital products such as account opening and payment services. The report emphasizes that as banks embark on digitalization, it is essential and prudent to evaluate the initiatives in terms of three key aspects - feature sophistication, business impact and integration with customer journey.

According to the report, given the integration of net banking and e-commerce applications and smartphone penetration, websites and mobile apps are loaded with valuable insights that could help banks improve their customer engagement and experience. Analysis of important metrics such as website traffic, its sources, bounce rate etc. help in gauging fruitfulness of the banks' outreach efforts.

Social media is fast emerging as the go-to tool for broadening customer outreach. Under this broad umbrella, presence of major banks varies across platforms. In this context, the report highlights some of the popular promotions that are run by GCC banks on social media. It also discusses how the top banks fare on vital statistics in each of these platforms. For example, banks in Kuwait are quite active and popular on Instagram. However, their engagement rate is lower than the GCC average.

As banks expand their digital footprint, periodic evaluation of the important metrics for each of their customer touchpoints, as highlighted in the report, would help the banks adopt an effective strategy and reap benefits of their digitalization initiatives.

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