Reinventing The Customer Experience

A while back, we realised that the service level and processes we offered our clients had scarcely changed in recent years, while the world around us had radically transformed, and was continuing to do so at a rapid pace. It’s true the large corporate banking operating environment is complex, making the move to digital slower. Nevertheless, if a corporate treasurer can manage all their personal retail banking affairs online or via an app, at some point they’re going to expect the same convenience at work. With this in mind, we decided it was time to launch and accelerate initiatives that would offer that same convenience to our corporate and institutional clients.

• Remove pain points: improve processes our clients find cumbersome, such as the credit or account opening process.
• Future models: truly understand our clients’ key challenges and develop new propositions to tackle them, possibly together with other partners.
• Capabilities: invest in the capabilities needed to improve the customer experience, such as new customer feedback tools, video banking, and digital and data capabilities.

We believe one of the strengths of ABN AMRO Corporate & Institutional Banking (CIB) is our personalised offering and focus on the client relationship. But we have to accept that our clients don’t particularly value that personal touch when it comes to standard or repetitive processes. They simply want those process to be as effortless as possible. Our initiatives therefore free up our bankers to focus on the things our clients value most: creative, sustainable solutions that help them run their business as effectively as possible. We work on both seamless digital services for straightforward requests and experiment with new services that go beyond traditional banking. Let’s take two very different examples: Warm Welcome, an onboarding process, and Treasury Booster, a cashflow forecasting tool.

The regulatory environment is increasingly complex and demanding. To minimise its burden on our clients we launched Warm Welcome, which focuses on client onboarding, including opening an account for an existing client.

Technological developments offer huge possibilities for making both due diligence processes and customer onboarding journeys smoother. Every ABN AMRO business line has therefore been working to introduce digital elements that improve these processes for their clients. For some client groups, this has already resulted in a fully digital, straight-through process. We’ve therefore joined forces across the bank, so we can learn from each other’s experiences in digitising the different process elements, such as online applications, digital document sharing, digital signing and digital verification & identification.

Within CIB, we have started a trajectory to improve the process by implementing such solutions. Together with the renewal of our business portal, Access Online, this would be a powerful combination that makes our offering future fit.

During a project to anticipate future client needs, we realised our clients often struggle to integrate different internal and external financial data sources in order to get data insights fundamental to cashflow forecasting. With Covid-19, this topic has become more relevant than ever.

Following a number of digital interactive sessions with clients, we came up with a cashflow forecasting tool, Treasury Booster, that can be linked to your banking products: data insights supporting competitive financial products. We’re now investigating the possibilities of launching a similar product with fintech partners. More news about to follow soon.

We believe that to be successful we must listen to our clients better than ever. A key part of this is continuing to test, experiment and develop things with clients. Most of whom actually like to be part of such a process and provide their invaluable input as the most important stakeholder of all, the end-user! We therefore plan to continue with this fruitful approach: operating as a sparring partner to our clients. So we can provide you with easy-to-use tools and services, allowing you to focus on what you do best: running your business!

Photo: Marlou Jenniskens (Daily Lead Reinventing the Customer Experience).