With everybody racing to perfect the digital banking experience and dominate the market, the key challenge is overriding the consumer need to have an in-person branch experience.

With over 20 years of branchless expertise, Axos Bank has mastered the art of creating that human touch consumers crave in a digital world.

On this episode of Leaders In Lending, Anthony Capizzano, SVP of Direct Consumer Lending at Axos joins us to discuss how they’re showing the industry how digital banking is done and how their servicing model is leading by example.

Branchless Bank

As a lucrative yet historically branchless bank, Axos has many success secrets to divulge when it comes to digital banking. Here are a few of them:

Soft touch points

Nothing is more frustrating and discouraging for a customer than trying to find the information they’re looking for to make a purchase.

Soft touch points are a customer’s interactions with the company software that guide them through the buying journey and make it easier for them to find the information they need very quickly.

Creating a seamless, easy-to-use website with operable search functionality can be notoriously tricky, but worth the investment.

According to Capizzano, Axos integrated soft touch points to anticipate questions, help their customers better articulate their needs and guide them to their destination as efficiently as possible.

Human topics

With so much advanced new technology out there like VR, it’s tempting for financial institutions to attempt to compete by wielding the most cutting edge tech of the day.

However, with a big jump like that—and especially when customers aren’t prepared to interact with it—it deters rather than attracts them. 

Once these banks started realizing that they were losing customers to smaller banks—those that could provide more human interactions—they had to readjust their services to better fit the true consumer demands.

At Axos, they learned early that while the latest technology is great and has potential to grow business, it’s useless to implement it if it doesn’t fulfill the customer’s needs.

Understanding your customer’s voice is key to providing human-based services.

Listening to complaints—whether it be through phone calls or comments on the web—helps elucidate that voice.

Product specialists

To further humanize the process, Axos decided to build product specialist teams to intervene at points where human interaction would be helpful. 

These product experts are able to provide more detailed answers for consumers at the exact moment that a consumer might prefer an in-branch experience.

This means that for each product, there is a specialist team behind it, trained to specifically understand a single product and learn to hone their answers to communicate the most amount of information 

Identifying certain questions for certain subjects is required to build a web experience that allows customers to attain more specific knowledge while also being given the option to easily get through to someone when they want interaction beyond the computer.

Once Axos perfected the humanization aspect of digital banking, they needed to focus their efforts on supplying the best consumer offerings.

Consumer offerings

By studying the industry’s emerging trends, Axos was able to identify the services that most benefited the consumer and make them their own.

SBLOC Loan

SBLOC loans have always been considered exclusive in the finance world—designed for bigger investment portfolios.

Axos believed that they should make the same types of secured loans accessible to members with smaller investments.

According to Cappizzano, their unique SBLOC loan “enables the average, everyday person to get access to inexpensive money,” so that they can satisfy their needs as quickly and efficiently as possible.

Cryptocurrency

Since cryptocurrency has proven over and over again to be a widely popular vault stock, Axos decided to provide a service that would allow people to secure against cryptocurrency.

While they’re still exploring how exactly to move forward with that initiative, they’ve narrowed the question down: “How as a bank do you enable consumers to use this as a secured asset?”

With crypto making waves in the currency market, Axos is attempting to diversify and harness another superpower.

Electric Vehicles

Electric vehicles are another product that Axos has turned its gaze toward.

Many banks are hesitant to enter the EV market because of its younger, riskier nature.

However, Axos sees it as an opportunity to get consumers what they really want, especially as more and more people continue to adopt electric transport.

They anticipate that, as demand grows, the dealership model will shift dramatically, departing from the traditional model that relied on back end products like repairs.

So it’s up to dealerships and lenders to reconsider how to evolve with the EV demand and create new products that will continue to make profit.

These are a few of the ways Axos Bank has led the branchless banking movement forward.