It is easy to mistake banking as a modern invention and forget that it is millennia old – merchants who gave grain loans to farmers and traders carrying goods between cities, and the depositing and storing of gold in temples are just some examples to show how far back it goes. While banking has constantly evolved over the years, at the heart of it are three fundamentals – saving money for the customer, lending money to the customer and moving money across entities. Having said that, the way banking has been done has obviously changed with the times.
Somewhere in the stages of this evolution, banking became about what banks wanted to sell and the products they offered the customer. Banks became institutions and while customers trusted their banks immensely, they also began to look at them as a little intimidating and complex. Change, as is said, is inevitable; the emergence and widespread access to technology began to put the focus on the customer more and more. Customer-centricity was no longer a buzzword and became the fastest way to gain new customers, keep existing ones and paved the way for greater growth. This customer-focus is also very telling of change being more rapid in the last fifty years than it has ever been before.
