Are Digital Expectations Transforming the Future for Banking?

The future of Banking Industry: a revolution in customer expectation for both products and services. Challenger banks are redefining the rules on customer experience, and financial technology (fintech) is creating a wave of new, app-based financial services that are usually cheaper and easier to use than those offered by the legacy banks. But how many customers have embraced digital banking, and are they satisfied with this new banking environment?

The COVID-19 pandemic has also become an important part of this equation because the branch networks of traditional legacy banks were dramatically impacted by quarantine and stay-at-home orders. Digital banks faced disruption to their operations and customer service processes because most employees had to transition to a work-from-home operating model, but after this initial hurdle they were functioning as normal.

Adding to Teleperformance’s firsthand experience with both legacy and challenger banks, the Teleperformance Customer Experience Lab (CX Lab) has analyzed the evolution of the retail banking sector since 2013 in its survey and has now given digital banking a new, stand-alone status that enables a clear comparison between how consumers evaluated both the traditional and contenders.

Let’s outline a few highlights from the CX Lab’s research this year. We found that 14% of the consumers in the survey only use a digital bank, but a further 32% use a traditional bank and also a digital bank, giving a total of 47% of consumers using a digital bank.

Although the average figure of almost half of all consumers looks positive for the digital banks, it is clear that adoption differs across demographics. For example, 53% of Millennials use a digital bank only, or a combination or digital and traditional. The figure for the younger Generation Z is lower at 43%, but this is skewed by 25% of this age group not yet having a choice over their bank—only the oldest in the Generation Z are already adults.

Digital banking is the single sector with the largest adoption of mobile apps by customers. 72% of all customers in this sector are using apps to interact with their digital bank’s brand. Perhaps this is not surprising, as many digital banks are built around the services that can only be offered via apps but many digital banks also offer access to services via the web. It’s clear that digital banking customers have a very high adoption of app usage, but there is an interesting distinction between consumers in some countries that are clearly far more comfortable using apps than others.


In Brazil, the adoption of apps is almost universal, with 94% of digital bank customers using an app. Colombia (92%) and Turkey (83%) are only slightly behind. App adoption for digital banking in these countries is far ahead of many developed economies such as the UK (59%), USA (58%), and Germany (55%).

The annual CX Survey was launched by the CX Lab in 2013 and covers a wide range of dimensions, such as channel preferences and brand perception. The 2021 CX Survey features participants from 13 different countries and analyzes 19 different industries, totaling 51,919 interviews. 2,660 of these interviews were focused on the digital banking sector and another 2,639 interviews were conducted with legacy bank customers using an external consumer panel. The future of banking may be changing now but investing in banking customer service guarantees positive results for the company. 

Our white paper details the CX Lab’s survey on digital banking, analyzes how the pandemic changed consumer behavior, and discusses the main KPIs for the industry in 2021. Download the full white paper for free.