Blog post updated 21 May 2020

Default new customers to eStatements

The Asian banking market isn’t as saturated as it is in developed countries, so there isn’t the same legacy of paper billing to contend with. The massive growth in new banking customers however, provides a great opportunity for bankers to default them to eStatements.

Psychology also plays a role – Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs (the premise that people must have their basic needs like food and shelter before they seek other things like luxuries and self-growth) works with modern day services too.

What comes first as a person starts earning enough money to enjoy more of the modern conveniences, such as mobile phones, computers, scooters, bank accounts and credit cards? What is the most accessible trapping of modern life? The answer is clearly internet access and an email address. Email provides vital connectivity and it’s generally free, thanks to Gmail, Hotmail and Yahoo.

Email is the common denominator

The question is: How many people registering for a new bank account, taking out a credit card or using a post-paid mobile phone service already have an email address? Logically, it’s a huge proportion!

And whilst it’s certainly true that many developing countries have relatively low Internet penetration – e.g. 7% in India and 12% in Indonesia – they also have huge populations, so these percentages translate to 81 million and 30 million connections respectively. With the right strategy in place, banks can drive eBilling adoption to this connected group and realise ROI within a matter of weeks.

Steps to achieving your adoption goal:

In order to capitalize on this opportunity and improve eStatement adoption, follow these simple steps:

• Ask your customers for their email addresses at every touch-point.
• Make ‘email address’ a mandatory field on all application forms.
• Send out an eWelcome Pack – useful numbers, branch locations etc. via email to every new email address/customer you have; include lifecycle messaging in your online strategy.
• Make eStatements the default for all new accounts and use transactional messaging to further reduce paper communications.

The same processes will work in mature markets too, but developing markets have more ‘low-hanging fruit’ – a large number of new bank accounts.

Don’t let low Internet penetration figures delay the drive for eStatements – maximize returns with a clear focus and robust paperless adoption strategy.

Striata’s eStatement Solution drives paperless customer adoption

Striata’s eStatement solution enables billers and financial institutions to replace paper statements with rich, interactive, secure electronic documents that are delivered directly to customer inboxes. It does not require customers to proactively enrol and remember usernames and passwords to retrieve their statements. It succeeds because customers respond reactively…

Customers receive the initial electronic version of their statement through an innovative ‘one click’ methodology and agree to have all future statements delivered as electronic documents only.

For added convenience customers can also save and view the eStatement offline or outside the email client, with all the security features intact.

Because convenience drives customer adoption, this delivery channel can be used to expand and complement existing online services, ultimately helping companies achieve their paper turn off-targets.

Striata eStatements offer dramatically increased security

Concerns over phishing for financial institutions are particularly acute. Consumers are wary of notification emails linking to websites, due to constant phishing emails that attempt to mimic notifications.

Striata eStatements, created as encrypted PDF or .emc email attachments, should only be accessed through the use of a shared secret, which is made up of personal data known only to the biller and the recipient, such as date of birth and last 4 digits on the credit/debit card. Security of the eStatement is fundamentally two-factor authentication; recipients need access to their email inbox plus knowledge of the shared secret. Security is further enhanced by the decryption process, which is offline and local to the recipient’s computer.