MuleSoft Finds 80% of Financial Services Organisations Do Not Provide Connected User Experiences

MuleSoft, provider a global integration and API platform, thas reported that 80% of organisations struggle to provide completely connected user experiences across all channels. 

MuleSoft’s 2022 Connectivity Benchmark Report shows that this comes at a time when almost three-quarters (72%) of financial services organisations’ customer interactions are now digital. Yet, as digitalisation accelerates, organisations could lose on average $7.6 million ($7,647,629) in revenue if they fail to successfully complete digital transformation initiatives.

To grow in today’s competitive environment, financial services organisations need to deliver connected digital experiences — for both customers and employees.

“Customer expectations for frictionless digital services are at an all-time high and continuing to rise,” said Jerome Bugnet, Director, Solution Engineering, MuleSoft. “However, it’s clear that financial services organisations are struggling to meet this need. All too often, financial IT is a complicated mix of legacy systems, where valuable customer data is scattered across disparate silos, making it difficult to draw the right customer data sets together to collaborate with others. Financial services organisations need to easily connect apps, data, and devices to automate their business, create seamless digital experiences and drive growth.”

Based on a global survey of 1,050 CIOs and IT decision-makers (of which 118 were from the financial services sector), the 2022 Connectivity Benchmark Report highlights the challenges and opportunities for organisations as they look to unlock their data to create and automate seamless experiences:

Customers expect seamless user experiences

Applications lie at the centre of digital transformation and efforts to enhance the user experience. On average, organisations are using 984 individual applications (compared to 901 a year ago). Yet only 29% of these applications are integrated on average, indicating there is still an enormous opportunity to improve connected user experiences in the finance sector. MuleSoft’s report indicates that:

• Creating connected user experiences has become increasingly difficult: More than half (59%) of financial services organisations said they find it difficult to integrate user experiences. This is up from 57% a year ago, showing there is increasing complexity for financial services organisations to meet their customers’ digital needs.
• Overcoming security and governance challenges is a hurdle: Data silos (54%) was cited as the biggest challenge to integrating user experiences, ahead of outdated IT infrastructure (51%) and security and governance challenges (49%).
• Integrating user experience delivers business benefits: Of the organisations that have integrated user experiences, more than half said it had increased customer engagement (56%) and enhanced visibility into operations (55%). Other benefits realised included innovation (53%), improved ROI (50%), faster delivery of projects to customers (46%) and increased
  automation adoption (41%).

“Digital agility is essential to successful transformation, allowing organisations to drive innovation at scale, deliver new initiatives faster, and create the experiences that customers want,” said Kurt Anderson, managing director and API transformation leader, Deloitte Consulting LLP. “A modern strategy that combines integration, API management, and automation is central to achieving digital agility. It enables organisations to easily connect and integrate their data, applications, and devices to create new digital capabilities and drive transformation projects.“