BEHIND THE NUMBERS: an agenda of automation

While COVID-19 has severely disrupted the financial services industry, it has presented opportunities too in terms of building efficiency for our customers and people.

"Our digital and automation agenda has helped improve our efficiency and productivity by about 22 per cent over the last three years.”

In ANZ’s Institutional bank we have been working on automation for some years now but it is an ongoing program which will continue to have a great impact on our corporate customers by simplifying their banking experience as well increasing our internal capacity.

The Institutional automation agenda is built on having the right programs and people in place and it is critical in underpinning the delivery of our business strategies.

What is working for Institutional is a culture of continuous improvement and innovation.

There is a strong connection between various automation projects across the value chain, as opposed to discrete pieces of work, underpinned by an ongoing partnership with our technology colleagues. As a division, we are working on a number of automation programs to meet our customers’ needs.

Combined with other divisional initiatives, our digital and automation agenda has helped improve our efficiency and productivity by about 22 per cent over the last three years.

The progress Institutional has made is a recognition that apart from large projects, thoughtful investments and small improvements really do make a difference. Embedding a culture of ongoing progress, building a digital mindset and building the right capabilities to execute was recently recognised with industry accolades in the Peter Lee and Greenwich surveys.

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Our progress

While there are many, I’ll outline some customer and employee experiences which are much better today than where we might have been just over a year ago:

• Our customers can now manage their cash and account queries online, at their convenience. They can track their requests in real-time and resolve simple queries online. Institutional customers in Australia have access to around 40 service requests available via Transactive Global, a self-service online platform. Examples of these digital self-service requests include Trace a Transaction, Stop a Cheque, Order a Deposit Book, Missing Deposit, Manage a Direct Debit and more. Before this, customers had to fill in tedious forms or call or email us. Requests like Stop Cheque or ordering a cheque or deposit book used to take 48 hours. Now they are completed online within minutes. We have seen about a 40 per cent reduction in voice-based calls from customers over the last three years.
• Today, customers use electronic signatures (E-sign) to authorise digital forms that were once paper-based - removing the need for customers to print, scan and mail their documents to ANZ. Today, in countries across Asia, the UK, US and New Zealand, customers can sign ANZ forms using electronic signatures.
• Users in Australia who call our customer service centres can now be digitally identified and verified without the need to answer security questions by following the prompts onscreen through a series of ‘challenge and response’ questions. This means no more asking questions such as “what’s the colour of your dog?” or “what was your first car?” that add to a customer’s frustration. Today, when a customer is using Transactive Global and needs help, they can click “Call Us” and will be provided with a unique telephone number/pin. On calling this number and entering the pin, the customer can bypass the ‘challenge and response’ step – not only saving the customer time but also providing context to our Service Agent for the reason of the call.
• We have a global credit platform – a one-stop-shop and integrated credit management capability for critical functions such as covenant management and customer limit management. Our teams have developed an online credit platform that spans more than 2,500 users across 20 countries. For customers, this means they are empowered by speed and ease and, for our bankers, it means having access to real-time data and analytics to make the right decisions.
• As part of our focus on significantly improving our client onboarding experience, our teams and customers in Australia are able to exchange documents and data securely through a Cloud-based, real-time, interactive portal with chat functionality – a simpler, more consistent way of helping onboard new-to-bank and new-to-product customers. Earlier, this process was managed manually with high volume exchange of emails and spreadsheets.
• We are expanding our know-your-customer (KYC) capability (GoldTier), currently used by our Markets business, to other geographies. This gives us a consistent platform with access to the most customer information that we can utilise before we need to go back to ask for more information. In time, this will replace 11 separate platforms that currently exist across our geographies.
• Together with our technology partners, we have built Cloud-enabled architecture to control and distribute customer data using a combined set of digital capabilities – called the digital lending backbone. This capability helps us integrate different systems and processes deployed under different projects.

Challenges and opportunities

All that aside, the testament to true customer experience is the adoption of digital by customers. Shifting consumer behavior to digital adoption is no small feat. It requires a good understanding of customers’ needs, customer-centric banking processes and tailored tools to support them and the people serving them.

The Institutional ambition over the next few years will be to look at building on these channels, data and platforms. The focus for Institutional remains firmly on straight-through processing, which has underpinned our thinking for some years,  and adopting better, new technologies.

Our automation agenda demands careful prioritisation, measured execution and continuous improvement – to make a difference to customers and employees.

Sreeram Iyer is Chief Operating Officer for ANZ Institutional