Savings Banks Group takes the stage with Tink at Nordic Banking Forum 2023
The 2023 Nordic Banking Forum saw Finnish Säästöpankkiryhmä – also known as Savings Banks Group – and Tink take the stage together. Looking at the everchanging cost of living, speakers Martti Hakala and Vesa Moisio talked through consumers in financial distress – and how banks can help.
The 2023 Nordic Banking Forum this year featured Finland’s Savings Banks Group and Tink, on how banks can help consumers in distress
Speakers Martti Hakala and Vesa Moisio covered how to empower Finnish consumers to understand their financial overview
With Tink’s money management tools, Savings Banks Group’s user experience is more streamlined, personally tailored and coaches customers towards financial wellness.
Enduring one of the most significant economic crises in decades, many European consumers are feeling the effects of the rise in cost of living in a very real sense. Almost half of UK consumers surveyed in Tink’s recent research fear their income will soon no longer cover essential costs. Against this backdrop, Martti, Head of Personal Banking at Savings Banks Group, and Vesa, Senior Business Development Manager at Tink, showed 2023 Nordic Banking Forum audiences how banks are uniquely positioned to coach their customers to financial wellness. Additionally, Savings Banks Group and Tink’s new partnership provided a timely example of how to tailor digital banking services to each customer – using real-time data.
The consumer experience: financial distress
Martti and Vesa provided compelling context by spotlighting Tink’s latest report, 'Banking is getting personal' – underlining that an estimated 25 million (46%) UK adults are only just managing to make ends meet.
Many UK consumers say they are struggling to keep up with constant price increases – and an overwhelming majority (97%) feel they need more support from banks. But it’s not just in the UK, in Germany more than half (53%) of consumers surveyed are using their savings to cover their current costs, and in France, 60% of consumers surveyed feel that they are forced to choose between essential products.*
How banks can help – while building loyalty
As a bank or financial service provider, going digital has become a hygiene factor – consumer expectations are high. Not only should every experience be seamless – it has to be personalised. And there are clear benefits in crafting personally tailored customer journeys. In fact, a third of consumers surveyed in our research would switch banks for financial wellness support tailored to their needs.
How then, can financial coaching in digital banking channels help consumers weather the storm? And in line with the Nordic Banking Forum theme for 2023, ‘Leading tomorrow’s bank’, how might this customer-centric approach help banks stay future proof?
Providing customers with more value throughout their banking experience – by transforming transactional data into innovative features – is a good start. And here’s where open banking tools come in: consumer engagement and financial coaching focused solutions like Tink Money Manager and Data Enrichment.
Designed to help financial institutions strengthen relationships with their customers, these engaging tools encourage customers to better understand and improve their spending habits. Empower your customers to set their own saving goals, categorise their expenses, budget more effectively and take action on their spending insights. Thanks to Tink’s data enrichment and open banking-powered support, financial institutions can assist their customers towards improved financial health. The benefit? This can boost engagement and build loyalty with both existing customers and prospective customers looking to manage the cost of living.
Savings Banks Group’s mission to support Finnish consumers
Savings Banks Group finds that like other countries, Finland is experiencing high inflation rates as property prices fall and Finnish GDP is not expected to grow in 2023. In a Savings Banks Group survey conducted in autumn 2023, an estimated 25% of respondents in Finland expressed concerns about the sufficiency of their finances.*
“The basic mission of Savings Banks Group has always been to help people prosper and take better care of their finances – and that’s what we’re still doing to this day. We’re now aiming to both future proof our business and help Finnish consumers to take the reins of their finances amid the current economic climate,” says Martti. In enhancing their digital channels through partnering with Tink, Savings Banks Group is introducing a new ‘Financial Wellbeing’ concept. The first phase is to help its customers better understand their finances, thanks to personally-tailored user experiences. And a key piece of open banking-based tech behind this is data categorisation, powering features such as:
Spending overview: offer your customers a holistic view of their spend and future balance by helping them link all their accounts in one place
Savings goals: help users track savings, create goals for saving, allocate funds, and better manage their finances
Categorised spending overview: visualise customers’ spending by category to help them understand their habits quickly
Budgeting: enable automatic budget creation so users can make decisions based on where they spend most
Balance forecasting: Money Manager’s ‘Left to Spend' feature shows a user their income after expenses, calculated monthly – helping them avoid overspending and adapting budgets effectively
Current and future recurring costs: show customers their recurring costs and where they can save, from subscriptions and gym memberships to loans and bills
“In customer meetings, our approach has focused on financial wellbeing for years and our customers have found it beneficial. With Tink, we will be able to continue to offer our customers the best money management tools to promote financial wellbeing – as well as through our digital channels.”
Banks as the key to unlocking financial wellness
Not only is people’s behaviour evolving to reflect the cost of living in challenging times, it’s also adapting to the expectations of a digitalised world. Banking and financial service providers are ideally positioned to meet this shift. What does this look like? Building customer trust and loyalty by scaling services into empowered financial coaching, or, plugging into tools from partners outside the scope of banking. It might even mean promoting tools that help customers understand, manage, and reduce their carbon footprint. Above all, building products, features and tools that help people achieve financial wellness – and offering consumers more choice. Ready to see how open banking puts you at the top of your game? Here’s how to get in touch.
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*About the research
For the UK: the research was conducted by Censuswide with 2,010 general consumers in the UK (nationally representative) 17–19 January, 2023. Censuswide abide by and employ members of the Market Research Society which is based on the ESOMAR principles and are members of The British Polling Council.
For France: the study was conducted by Opinion Way on behalf of Tink 25–26 January, 2023 with a sample of 1007 people representative of the French population aged 18 and over. The sample was drawn up according to the quota method, with regard to the criteria of sex, age, socio-professional category, category of agglomeration and region of residence.
For Germany: the survey was conducted by OnePoll on behalf of Tink 1–3 February, 2023 with a sample size of 1,000 German adults. The sample was representative of the German population aged 18 years and over, with quotas based on gender, age, socio-professional category, urban area and region of residence.
For Finland: the Savings Barometer 2023 was conducted in September 2023 on behalf of Savings Banks Group, with 1,375 respondents in Finland, aged between 18 and 69.
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