RBI’s Retail Banking Europe conference in Amsterdam brought together a cross-section of the region’s leading retail bankers and some of the sector’s most innovative technology partners. Douglas Blakey chaired the event and in between sessions, canvassed opinion of a number of the speakers and event sponsors
Marc West, senior vice president of technology development at Fiserv, headline sponsors of the RBI Retail Banking Europe conference, tells RBI that there is always a tremendous amount of excitement in the market if you can create new customer experiences.
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And, he adds, there are always clever ways of creating value for the banks, at scale while managing costs but change is the constant-recognise that and be clear about your outcomes.
“That is what matters most. Openness is the key trend. Banks are dealing with APIs every day – they have partnerships that they work through every day to achieve scale value for their customers and that trend is only set to continue.
“Simplification of that is what is most important and how that works in an open banking way will create the most value for everyone.”
At Nordea, simplification is enshrined in the job title of one of the bank’s executives, Jukka Salonen.
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By GlobalDataNordea’s COO and head of group simplification tells RBI: “In order to build up a true end to end digital bank that is able to operate in the fintech and open banking world, banks need to consider replacing their core banking system.”
It is, he concedes, a big transformation but he argues that many banks will have to be bold enough to make such decisions in order to build their organisations for future challenges.
The dramatic changes in consumer behaviour is a theme hammered home by Benoit Legrand, Global Head of Fintech, ING.
He tells RBI:”Customers are taking power and banks have to adapt to this – banks must work very differently compared with how they have been used to working.
“Banks must be able to put the customer really at the core of their thinking and by using data personalise the relationship that they have with customers.”
Says Legrand, banks can no longer work in isolation.
“The world is opening up and everyone is interconnected with everyone. This is not a new development at ING – we disrupted ourselves 20 years ago with ING Direct. We have disruption in our genes – innovation is embedded in the bank’s strategy.”
Legrand’s update on the development of ING’s €300m capital fund for fintech investment is of particular interest to the conference attendees.
ING is currently working with 115 different fintech partners having dropped 35 along the way.
Adds Legrand:” We are transforming the way we are working internally – we want to work the way firm operate such as Spotify. We need to make sure we can attract the most talented people; our biggest challenge is to transform our culture.”
Instant, accessible, proactive
Tapping best practice from outside the banking sector is a theme echoed by Edward Dillon, director of innovation at KBC Bank Ireland.
He tells RBI that when KBC set up in Ireland in 2013 the bank made a point of recruiting from non-bank sectors such as hospitality and retail.
Says Dillon: “As a digital first challenger brand, the customer experience has to be benchmarked outside of our sector. Think retail and not bank; think outside the sector.”
It is, he says, an incredibly exciting time to be setting up a new bank.
“Displacement or disruption that we will experience is not from competitive forces but will ultimately be displacement by our customers.
“Customers will take control of their data and they will control their uses of data. The winning banks will be those that can offer customer experiences that are unique.”
Echoing Marc West, Dillon adds;” Simplicity is at the core of everything we do, such as the product proposition and the processes that support execution.”
Dillon says that as the bank kicked off its Ireland launch, it did not want to target the mass market: its marketing strategy was aimed at the segment of the market with the greatest propensity towards digital adoption.
The traditional channel is however part of the KBC channel proposition, with 15 physical hubs.
“We are omnichannel-we must give customers the option to bank by any channel of their choice.”
Optimising the account opening process has been a key priority for KBC.
“In 2016, we launched mobile onboarding but it was still full of friction. Customers had to fill in 179 fields and that involved 26 separate steps. That meant many new customers, with the intention of opening an account, gave up.
“We have now cut the 26 steps down to five so that customers can open a new account and be banking in less than five minutes. For too long, we bankers thought that just by giving a customer an account number that meant they were onboarded.
“You need to activate that customer. As part of that, we launched a digital wallet while other innovations include KBC being the first bank in Ireland to roll out Android pay and Apple pay and recently we were one of first to launch fitbit pay.”
KBC has grown customer numbers since its Ireland launch to 250,000 and Dillon says the bank is on target to hit its target of 500,000.
“Three pillars are key to success: be instant, accessible, proactive.”
Anne Dorst, Strategy Director at Collinson Group tells RBI that banks have a great opportunity to take advantage of all the new technology and data led decisions to make the customer experience much better.
“Sometimes it feels like a risky area but customers are more and more demanding these days.
“What we want to do is really encourage people to give them the experiences that they want and the rewards, protection and the assistance and seamless technological experience that they have in other areas of their life.
“Customers deserve and demand a better experience.”
For Alastair Brown, vice president, marketing, Dealflo, there is optimism that banks can improve the customer experience by accelerating adoption of agreement automation.
“Business benefits come about by automating financial agreements and in addition retail banks can take risks out of the process by automating end to end.
There does not have to be a customer experience trade off with risk, and he tells RBI:” It is pleasing to see how retail banks are looking to fintech providers such as Dealflo with deep subject matter expertise to help them on that digital agenda.”
The argument that increased risk protection need not come at a cost to the customer experience is also made by Omri Kletter, head of fraud & authentications solutions, at NICE Actimize.
He tells RBI: “It is essential that banks tackle fraud in real time. We do that mainly through analytics and leverage additional data to prevent actionable risk .
“It is encouraging that the issue of analytics and real time fraud monitoring is now on the main agenda for banks’ boards of directors.
“We all want to keep the customer happy but the overall journey at the same time must also be safer.”
