Financial services companies turn to mobile messaging

With financial services companies more at risk from the consequences of a data breach than other businesses, they're on the look out for the safest, most secure communication channels to interact with customers and employees.

New research from IDC and mobile engagement specialist OpenMarket reveals that mobile messaging is the top tool many are utilizing to accomplish this task with 80 percent of global financial services organizations using Global SMS/mobile messaging to communicate and share sensitive info.

This is seen as having a big effect on customer experience with 80 percent of these businesses believing SMS has a considerable or major impact on customer service and 73 percent considering it to be very effective for employee-focused emergency alerts.

Other findings from the study are that more than half of organizations use mobile messaging to differentiate or improve the customer experience, while 35 percent use the technology to attract and retain new customers.

More than 25 percent use it to improve their risk mitigation and more than 20 percent use it to ensure business continuity and to enhance multichannel delivery capacity. However, only 15 percent use mobile messaging to improve their organization’s security.

Because it's secure and scalable, and with critical capabilities such as two-factor authentication for fraud detection, secure SMS technology is being rapidly adopted industry-wide. According to the research, the top customer-facing uses for SMS include timely offers and notifications regarding high-risk, high-dollar transactions. Secure SMS messaging is used to gain deeper customer insights and to meet industry compliance requirements by 30 percent of companies.

Internally, financial services organizations use mobile messaging as a key component for employee communication and contingency planning to improve their internal security and enable secure employee notifications. Business leaders are also driving new investments in mobile messaging and are closely involved in solution, specification, selection, and deployment to ensure that technologies are meeting the standards the industry.

"These findings show that financial services organizations are incorporating secure, effective mobile messaging into many aspects of their customer service and employee communications, as well as their internal business operations," says Jay Emmet, General Manager of OpenMarket. "A well-designed, company-wide mobile messaging strategy that meets the industry’s high-compliance and regulated standards will allow businesses to enhance the customer experience, gain additional customer insights, improve employee relations, and drive operational efficiencies".

More detail is available in the full report which can be downloaded from the OpenMarket website.

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