Organizations are often coordinating a balancing act between three distinct categories when it comes to their products: convenience, security, and privacy. The financial services industry is no different. Many times, if a bank is excelling in one of these categories, they are likely struggling to keep up in other areas. What makes this balance particularly challenging today is evolving consumer expectations amid new technologies and increasingly digital experiences.
More and more, consumers are living their lives online and expecting more from the financial products and services they use. In fact, according to Salesforce, 73% of customers expect better personalization when technology advances, and 74% expect better personalization when they provide more data. If businesses don’t keep up with these expectations, they will lose to the competition.
I’m here to tell you – it doesn’t have to be a battle between convenience, security, and privacy. Financial services organizations could excel in all three of these areas, rather than just one or two. The sweet spot is ensuring each is optimized and flexible, rather than building a fixed solution that is expensive to change as technology needs evolve. As a result of this balance, we can accelerate how fast customers see value from their investment while maintaining critical flexibility, and it’s all made possible with one simple answer: identity orchestration.
What is Identity Orchestration?
Let’s consider the customer identity journey as an orchestra. When we refer to the customer identity journey, we are talking about things such as the login experience, how many steps it takes for a website or application to authenticate who a user says they are, and so on. Each instrument in this orchestra is a different identity service and application - inclusive of user authentication, authorization, and verification. If just one of the instruments in this orchestra misses a cue or is not performing at its best, it will throw off the entire experience for the listener - or in this case, the customer - and likely lead to negative perceptions. This immediately ruins the concert.
That’s why the conductor of the orchestra is so critical. They are in charge of seamlessly ensuring the management and coordination of these instruments to make certain they all perform in the most harmonious way. The end goal is to create an extraordinary experience for the listener. And in this situation, identity orchestration is the ‘conductor’ of the orchestra, creating what we can call identity symphonies. The end goal? A great performance from the orchestra and a positive, seamless experience for the listener – a symphonic identity journey.
As you’ve likely surmised, identity orchestration is an approach to optimizing consumers' experiences and is rooted in human identity - which is at the heart of all of today’s digital experiences. Identity orchestration provides comprehensive control across identity services, enabling organizations to visualize and map out how their customers are using different services at every stage in their journey. So what does this all mean for the business and its customers?
The Impact of Identity Orchestration
The customer experience is one of the most important aspects for a business, impacting everything from profits to brand reputation. According to PwC, even when U.S. consumers admire a company or product, more than half will walk away after several bad experiences, and 17% will walk away after just one bad experience. It’s imperative that financial services organizations create great digital experiences, not just for the benefit of the customer, but for the future of the business and longevity of customer loyalty.
While the ultimate goal of identity orchestration is to help create these incredible digital experiences, it goes far beyond that and can also impact organizations in the following ways:
- Keeping teams agile: Instead of spending weeks or months developing integrations to connect to multiple vendor solutions or homegrown systems, low-code or no-code identity orchestration can free up teams and help them focus on what matters most.
- Providing better control over CX: Identity orchestration enables full control over what vendors and services you want to integrate into digital experiences, ensuring you generate the greatest impact and highest engagement.
- Driving consistency across channels: In our increasingly digital world, it’s challenging to keep consumers' experiences consistent - but identity orchestration makes this easy across multiple applications, devices, and use cases.
All of these lead to an important distinction between good products and great products: the time to value that customers see from them.
How Identity Orchestration Accelerates Time to Value
Not only does the orchestra’s conductor - identity orchestration - help banks create seamless experiences and improve customers’ security posture, but it also accelerates the time to value that customers are able to realize. This is because identity orchestration enables organizations to rapidly iterate and optimize the user journey. For example, if one combination of instruments or musical notes is not working, the conductor can easily and seamlessly fix this issue in record time to course-correct and keep the tune harmonic. It’s likely that due to this rapid speed, the listener doesn’t even realize that there’s been any error at all.
A great identity orchestrator can provide an intuitive, low-code or no-code interface that minimizes the skills barrier and facilitates rapid iteration. It enables teams to design, test, and optimize digital experiences that delight customers and drive value for your business - ultimately eliminating friction, enhancing security, and ensuring compliance with privacy regulations.
With identity orchestration at the helm, banks and other financial organizations no longer need to choose between security, privacy, and convenience. They can now create a beautiful digital experience symphony using identity orchestration and create better experiences, faster.
