Banks Learn from Remote Working to Improve Customer Experience

How does a bank get closer to an individual from a distance? This is the challenge facing firms during the coronavirus pandemic, but those that figure it out will future-proof their organizations.

At Natixis, a lot of effort has gone into replacing physical interaction with customers with new ways to engage, said Elvie Lahournere, director of digital and innovation for Asia-Pacific at the corporate and investment bank. Lahournere said the French firm had already been thinking about this before the pandemic—as all banks were. Post-Covid-19, however, they’re looking to “push this forward to the next level”, anticipating that customers will become accustomed to remote and electronic interactions, as global lockdowns have forced people all over the world to become more technologically savvy in conducting day-to-day activities. 

“How can we become very close to our customers by the way we communicate to them, but also through a particular set of projects or products that are much closer to their needs?” she said, speaking at the inaugural WatersTechnology Innovation Exchange.

For example, Natixis is working on a “smart engine” that will combine and leverage all of the bank’s internal data. For a use case like trade finance, for example, the engine will allow the bank to deploy an “augmented banker” to support employees. This AI helper will take on menial tasks and populate information the bank already has, allowing employees to focus on more advanced tasks.

There are analytics, delivery, and connection challenges that will need to be overcome—it’s never as simple as throwing all the data into a data lake and hoping for a coherent output—but the bank is taking incremental steps to ensure it does it right. 

It is also  having to make sure that the proper cybersecurity controls are in place. Remote workforces create new security vulnerabilities, and the bank is turning to AI to help employees navigate these uncharted waters.

“There are a lot of cybersecurity aspects related to that, and we need to be ready,” Lahournere said. “So we’ve strengthened the way we address cybersecurity internally. We have put [in place] more controls, and we are developing a smart solution to be able to have some alerts regarding all the little different exposures that we have. … We have found that the frontier between personal and professional life has deeply changed. We needed to strengthen this kind of alert, to be able to have a clearly defined definition and barrier for our employees that they can be safe working from home.”

Natixis has also increased its cybersecurity training, emphasizing to employees that this is not just an IT issue, but one that concerns each individual employee.

“I think this is really important, because we are not going back to January 2020,” Lahournere said. The bank has managed to run 100%, even with its traders working remotely, and some employees just really like working from home, she added. 

“I would say it would be counter-intuitive and counter-progressive to [go] back,” she said.

Shifting Priorities

Kelvin Tan, head of innovation for treasury and markets for the technology and operations group at Singapore-headquartered DBS Bank, spoke on the same panel. He echoed Lahournere’s sentiments, adding that Covid-19 has forced the firm to shelve some more ambitious projects that were in the pipeline, in favor of technologies that focus on how employees conduct their jobs remotely.

“Projects and budgets are all impacted as well,” Tan said. “Many of the more ambitious projects that we wanted to run this year have been scaled back, and a lot more focus has been put on employees.”

The bank has looked to embrace virtual desktop infrastructures—a path that many banks across the globe have taken—enabling two-factor authentication for employees, and improving employee remote-working connectivity.

“There are some functions that in the past were deemed higher risk in terms of security to be working from home. Now, we are enabling technologies that would allow these functions to also work from home securely,” he said.

AI’s Importance Grows

While the immediate focus has been on making sure employees and teams can work remotely, looking ahead, the bank can use what it learned during the pandemic about employees’ needs to improve customer interactions, as well. AI will also prove valuable when improving the customer experience

“Next year, [AI] is already going to be fairly widely used throughout the financial industry,” Tan said. “Many of the counterparts that I know, as well as ourselves, are really putting a lot of focus in this area, especially this year and definitely even more next year.”

Kirill Petropavlov, director for AI innovation at the Bank of Singapore, added that the key to this shift to AI is to first get the data right internally, but also combining that with useful external data. Petropavlov said the bank is using analytics to understand customers better. 

“It’s also integrating with external data sources to know what’s going on better out there in the world,” Petropavlov said. “Even though the banks say, ‘We’ve got all this data,’ in fact, what we’re saying is sometimes we don’t even know exactly what it is. So there’s a push towards openness and open APIs, whether it’s open data and support, where you actually start to communicate between different organizations and [as a result] people actually get better services.”