Digitisation and self service do not equal good client service
A bank can have an excellent app and still be difficult to deal with. The cause is not always the technology itself. In some cases, the process was poorly designed to begin with. In others, regulatory requirements have accumulated into layers of checks and hand-offs, or the underlying systems were never built to share context. More often, it’s a combination of all three. Connecting the work therefore means looking beyond integration to the process, controls and architecture supporting the full-service journey.
European banks have transformed how customers open accounts, make payments, manage products and ask for help. Fast, intuitive digital service is no longer a novelty; it is the price of admission.
Yet easier contact isn’t necessarily easier resolution.
A customer might start a request in an app, follow up through a contact centre and eventually reach a specialist team. Every channel could work as designed, but the customer may still need to repeat information, wait while someone searches for context or call back because nobody can see where the request sits.
The real test comes when the digital journey stops working or a request falls outside the standard process. These moments give the bank a rare opportunity to shape the relationship. A person who can step in with the context and authority to resolve the issue can turn friction into trust; one who asks the customer to start again does the opposite.
The cost is hiding between the systems
For technology leaders, the next challenge is not necessarily another channel. It is connecting those channels to the operations that fulfil them.
The pressure to do that is growing. Euro-area banks recorded average returns on equity of close to 10% in the first half of 2025, but the European Central Bank (ECB) has warned that margin compression and subdued lending could weigh on future earnings. Celent also found that 54% of European retail banks surveyed believe winning and retaining customers has become harder than it was a year earlier.
Improving cost-to-serve is an obvious priority, but many of the costs involved are easy to miss.
They surface when an employee re-enters information the customer has already supplied. When a request moves through several queues without a clear owner. When teams turn to email because the formal process cannot handle an exception. Or when someone must piece together a customer’s history across multiple systems before deciding what to do next.
A bank’s internal structure should not dictate the customer’s experience. Customers deal with one bank and expect it to act as one. Yet thousands of internal hand-offs create slower service, more manual work and an experience that feels far less coherent than the digital front-end suggests.
A completed interaction is not a resolved request
Banks can measure call waiting times, chatbot containment, form completion and app availability in detail. Those measures reveal channel performance, but they do not always reflect the customer experience. The question that matters most is simpler: did the customer get what they needed?
Each interaction can meet its target while the request itself continues to move around the organisation. First-time resolution offers a better measure of customer experience because it focuses on the outcome rather than the performance of one channel.
Improving first-time resolution, however, takes more than measurement. The request itself needs to become the organising unit of work.
What connecting the work actually requires
That starts with a persistent case record: a shared source of context that follows the request across channels, teams and systems. It should show what the customer needs, what has already happened, who owns the next action and which decisions or approvals remain outstanding.
Around that record, an orchestration layer can coordinate the work without requiring every underlying platform to be replaced. It can route activities to the right team, invoke existing systems, manage exceptions, apply controls and make delays visible before the customer has to follow up.
This is not about creating one enormous system that performs every banking function. Core platforms, payment systems, customer databases and specialist applications can continue doing the jobs they were built to do. The orchestration layer connects their contribution to the wider service journey.
The process matters just as much as the architecture. Automating unnecessary checks or badly designed hand-offs only makes the inefficiency move faster. Banks first need to establish which controls are essential, which steps genuinely add value and where complexity has become habit rather than necessity.
Resilience extends beyond the application
Fragmentation is not only an efficiency or customer-experience problem. It can make operational resilience harder to understand too.
During the first year of reporting under the Digital Operational Resilience Act, financial entities across the EU reported 3,383 major ICT-related incidents. The ECB has also highlighted banks’ growing reliance on a relatively small number of technology providers, the limited substitutability of some providers and the difficulty of bringing certain outsourced services back in-house.
Knowing that an application can recover from disruption is therefore only part of the picture. Banks also need to understand how an important service is delivered from beginning to end: the systems it touches, the teams involved, the points at which work changes hands and the third parties supporting it.
An app may be technically available while the process behind a customer request has stalled. As far as the customer is concerned, the service is still not working.
AI cannot create continuity on its own
AI adds another reason to address these gaps. It can summarise histories, classify requests, retrieve information and recommend actions, but it cannot create continuity where none exists. A faster chatbot achieves little if the request it creates disappears into an opaque queue.
With the EU AI Act taking effect in phases, banks must also be able to trace what informed an automated recommendation, what happened next and where human oversight came into play. The strongest AI use cases will sit inside journeys that are already understood, controlled and measurable. Otherwise, banks risk automating the gaps rather than closing them.
Start with one journey
Connecting an entire banking operation is too broad a starting point. A better approach is to choose one high-volume, high-friction service journey and trace it from the customer’s first interaction to final resolution.
Where is context lost? How many teams and systems are involved? Which hand-offs add value, and which exist because the process has always worked that way? Who owns the request when an exception occurs? Can the bank see that it is delayed before the customer asks?
The answers reveal where process redesign, a persistent case record and service orchestration can work together as a customer experience solution. They also show where deeper platform modernisation is genuinely needed, and where targeted change can deliver value sooner with less disruption.
European banks have already changed how customers access banking. The next competitive gain lies in making one promise real: once a customer asks for something, the bank should be able to carry that request, its context and its ownership all the way through to resolution.
