Teaching an Old Dog New Tricks: Digital Banking in the Age of COVID-19 A column devoted to answering your questions on consumer, mortgage, small business and non-profit investments and lending programs to help you navigate the new financial landscape. Send your questions to bill.carter@civicfcu.org. Since mid-March most of us have been in some state of lock-down as our country and our communities try to find a way to wrangle this deadly virus to the ground.This has caused many of us to work from home, or to work from company offices, now allowing only a few essential workers to come to work to keep infection transmissions to a minimum. Forced to adapt to a new digital world has been a challenge as we have had to learn conferencing technology such as Zoom,WebEx,Teams and other platforms to communicate and collaborate with fellow workers. My wife and I have endured one another working from home during this time (she’s an angel), but we have had to get use to relying more upon online services for food, medicines, entertainment, clothing etc. to safely secure our health from this highly contagious disease.
We were obtaining a loan during the outbreak from a local financial institution in late March.The virus limited how many people could work at a time, and significantly slowed down the underwriting approval process.When it came time to close on the loan, we were instructed to arrive at the branch wearing our masks and to call our loan officer from our car.When we arrived, there was a table sitting outside with the loan papers and two pens.We made the call and our loan officer came to the front door wearing a mask, a visor, and gloves, and she advised us to sign the documents where they were marked. Once we signed, we had to get back in our car and wait for the loan officer to come outside to review and give us a thumbs up.There were errors that we didn’t catch so some of the loan documents had to be re-signed later and dropped off at the drive through window.
The loan was finally funded, and we had accomplished one of our financial goals, but not without wasting a WHOLE lot of our time and energy. Everything has changed in the wake of Covid-19. Especially how we transact our daily business. Now I’m a creature of habit. I’m set in my ways. I like listening to vinyl records. I like old tube radios from the 40s and tube guitar amplifiers from the 60s. I like dealing directly with people. I like tactile things that I can see and touch. But the old ways are not always the best ways, and most of us are afraid to step out of our comfort zones to make major changes in any aspect of our lives. But most of the time, once we get comfortable with the new routine, we wonder why it took us so long to make the change.
Record Breaking Changes In Record Breaking Time Digital and mobile banking in various forms have been around for a while, with online resources that make it easier to check account balances, transfer funds, pay bills, apply for and close loans, and more with the convenience of making these transactions at any time from just about anywhere there is cell service. From January to April, as the grip of Covid-19 tightened, a major bank’s digital business leapt threefold.The bank chairman said that this new era forced a “massive shift in consumer behavior.’’The speed of the bank’s digital innovation programs, without the onset of the coronavirus,“might have taken 10 years, and we just did it in two months.’’ We are witnessing banking being reinvented in real time and acting now couldn’t be more important for all financial institutions. Pre-Covid-19 saw an annual percentage of online digital business increase from 25 percent in January to an astounding 75 percent by April of this year. The COVID-19 outbreak, which has presented bank customers with unprecedented exposure to online and mobile banking capabilities, has resulted in an extraordinary untethering of physical dependencies that otherwise would have taken years to complete. In the past many institutions looked at digitization to reduce costs and offer more competitive rates. Now they are racing to implement more digital services to enable better customer experiences as well as more efficiency in their operations. Are you a good candidate for digital and mobile banking? Let’s look at some of the features and benefits of digital banking along with some limitations that might not make it suitable for your banking needs.
Advantages Of Online Banking Fast Transactions As already mentioned before, most online systems process real-time, which means your transactions ill be completed immediately. You do not have to wait in a long line or race across town to make a deposit.And in an age of non-stop busyness in our lives, time and energy are in short supply. Anything that needs to be done can
18 Fall • 2020
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