Today at Finovate Europe 2018, Meniga, the global leader of white-label digital banking solutions and three-time Finovate winner, presented its latest personal finance innovation that encourages banks to branch out from the familiar digital banking customer experience.

With Open Banking upon us, banks need to defend their position as the go-to provider of financial services and engage more meaningfully with customers. At Finovate, Meniga demonstrated how banks can use third party data, such as merchant directories and open API connectors, to deliver insightful advice and actionable content – such as restaurant recommendations and subscription trimming – to users in the previously under-utilised transaction detail screen.

Banks can engage more successfully with customers by solving everyday problems for them, helping them create new habits and designing their apps to ensure that a user’s time is well spent. Meniga’s approach to engagement is to create a seamless customer experience by providing content in context; for example, utilising previous banking ‘dead-ends’ such the transaction detail screen to put insights at customers’ fingertips.

Banks have access to more relevant data than many leading technology companies, but this is often spread across a range of systems, making it challenging to pull together an overall picture of what data is available. Open Banking is forcing banks to better organise their customer data, which in turn allows them to complement their own data with third party sources and provide customers with interesting insights by simply clicking on a transaction.

Finnur Magnússon, chief product owner at Meniga commented: “We believe that banks have been ignoring their most valuable data – the transaction. Spotify has music, Netflix has films, Instagram has photos and Banks have transactions. They shouldn’t think of transactions as boring lines of text and code but as a story of people's lives that are full of interesting insights. Helping users better understand their financial lives by enriching transactions has the potential to really strengthen the relationship between banks and their customers.

“Recently we introduced our new app in our native market,” he added. “We redesigned and simplified the user experience by contextualising functions and content, and already our data shows that daily user engagement has increased by almost 400% since the launch.” 

Meniga works with some of the largest global banks, including Santander, Intesa Sanpaolo, ING Direct and Commerzbank to enrich transaction data, personalise digital channels and drive customer engagement. The company recently announced a major partnership with Groupe BPCE, the second largest banking group in France, to accelerate innovation and bring personalised digital banking solutions to customers across France.