You can also listen to this podcast on iono.fm here.
In this podcast, Deborah Fenton, head of onboarding and servicing for the mid-corporate market at Nedbank Business and Commercial Banking, explains the massive leaps enabled by technology and AI in the mid-corporate market.
But the magic ingredient is not technology alone – it’s using technology combined with the human touch to better navigate the complexities of business. This combination, she says, is the magic ingredient that Nedbank is pursuing.
CIARAN RYAN: You may have noticed how technology and AI have dramatically altered the business landscape. The same, needless to say, is happening in banking.
We’re finding out that digital onboarding and artificial intelligence can improve business efficiency in ways that were inconceivable just a few years ago. Technology is making banking processes faster, more transparent and easier to navigate.
Well, let’s dig into it. Joining us now is Deborah Fenton, head of onboarding and servicing for the mid-corporate market at Nedbank Business and Commercial Banking.
Greetings, Deborah. I guess it’s fair to say that businesses are becoming more comfortable with digital banking; but with this comes the question of trust. How do you balance the expectation of trust in a very digitalised banking environment?
DEBORAH FENTON: I think that’s an interesting question because, as much as AI is starting to take over in many aspects of work, we are still quite conservative in how we use it within banking.
In the mid-corp environment, especially, where we have very large and complex clients, we are not necessarily using it to make credit decisions or things like that which actually impact the client’s business wellbeing.
We are using it to augment this with our staff to help them in some of their back-office processing, so that we can improve that – the workings and efficiencies – without impacting the clients or anything that we haven’t fully trained the AI to do.
Obviously with AI comes a lot of training and knowledge and depth to the business.
So we want to maintain our client relationship, our people interactions, and the trust that our clients give us with their business [so] that we know we are using technology in the background to help augment that, and not to necessarily take over the way that we deal with the clients currently.
So as much as we have frontline systems that the clients can use for their own self-service or to open accounts, they still have a person they can phone or email at any point that will help them to navigate those processes.
CIARAN RYAN: Yes, I would imagine the human touch – you never want to lose that. And I don’t think the clients want that, even though they’ll find a lot of efficiencies going digital-only.
But it brings us to the question of digital onboarding, and that’s often seen as a fairly serious hurdle. How have things changed with technology to make this simpler and more efficient for businesses in the mid-corporate market?
DEBORAH FENTON: With that, what we have done is we have actually appointed onboarding specialists who are there almost as project managers to help guide the clients through the process.
Because with all onboarding, as much as we try and make it efficient, there are rules and regulations. There is compliance, there are things that we need to get from the clients in order to take it forward.
What we’ve done is we have a person in place who then chats to the clients and helps them navigate the process as to what we do.
But we also do try to make sure that we get enough information off the systems that are publicly available to us, so we can draw the company information from CIPC [Companies and Intellectual Property Commission] so we can get that data. [Information is drawn from publicly available and permitted verification sources].
We don’t have to ask the client for it; we can retrieve their IDs from the Department of Home Affairs.
There are things that we can do to speed up the process, [so] that we can automatically start gathering [information].
And then another factor that we’ve done quite successfully is incorporate digital signatures as part of our onboarding flow.
So where we need the client to sign for something – and in the old days we would take like a box of paperwork to the client to get them to sign it – we can now send it to them digitally so that they can just insert their signature. It makes that process a lot simpler and a lot quicker.
Now obviously we still can’t reduce all the paperwork, because there are legal ramifications and risks and things we have to protect, but we at least don’t have to have a poor client breaking their wrist, trying to sign papers for hours.
This way they can choose to digitally sign it. It can happen really quickly. It cuts across borders if the clients are overseas or in other provinces, and we don’t have to worry about that paper trail.
In that we’ve seen a massive improvement, especially in turnaround times, because we can onboard multiple entities in a much reduced time because of the digital offering.
CIARAN RYAN: Yes, I would imagine the client’s expectations have evolved in the digital era. You’ve mentioned being able to compress time without them having to sign boxes of paper.
So what are the clients actually expecting from all of this? Is it a more data-rich environment for them as well?
DEBORAH FENTON: I think they’re definitely expecting that because, even in their personal capacity, if they are a business owner, they’ve got your private banking, which is very automated these days, very digital and also, to be fair, a lot easier to do on an individual basis when you are looking at complex clients.
So there is a big expectation as to how we can be more efficient, how to do things quicker. That has become quite a demand.
What we have done is that we have augmented the staff with technology. So we still have that person, we still have that personal touch. We’re not pushing the client to do anything themselves unless they want to.
The channel exists, and we are then augmenting that with some robotics in the background which help our staff get things delivered to them quicker. So we don’t put the pressure on the client; we keep the pressure on ourselves in the back office so that we can do [things] appropriately.
And, like you mentioned, we also then tap into the different sort of data sources that exist so that we can then start pulling information.
We have the history of the client, a whole lot of rich data on them, so we can also help them and navigate some of their businesses through exposing them to some of that data, as well as getting our processes more efficient through that.
CIARAN RYAN: Let’s get into the nitty-gritty a bit here. Technology and AI are moving pretty fast. People will be familiar with the chatbots that the banks have been operating, but we’re talking about something quite different here.
How has this changed and improved the banking experience for customers in the last, let’s say, two years?
DEBORAH FENTON: In my opinion having the data and analytics available gives us a lot more insight into the client, and we can have more meaningful conversations.
We can immediately tap into the information that we know about the client or that we can gather and use AI to help us reframe that and to make it more succinct – because there is a lot of information out there that we can use.
And artificial intelligence helps us gather that in a more succinct manner so that when we talk to our clients we have a lot more meaningful information and can cut through the noise that lies around some of these things.
With that, in order to improve our service delivery, we can also automate a lot of our sort of back-office processes that are quite slow and cumbersome.
We had a scenario recently where we reduced one of our processes from six weeks down to two days, and that was purely because of the volume of information we get asked for and the amount of time it takes a person to process it – because manual processes naturally take time, whereas technology can continue processing in the background.
So there are a lot of those examples where you can start seeing massive improvements from a client’s perspective almost immediately.
CIARAN RYAN: Now finally, Deborah, from what you’re saying, the future of banking is going to be a blend of technology [and] AI – but with the human touch. Is this correct?
DEBORAH FENTON: Yes, absolutely. I think that is key to running a successful business at this level of client.
So when you are in the upper echelons of business you want to have that personal touch, you want to have someone who can respond to you quickly and you expect that to happen fast, and to be professional.
So with that, you’ve trusted the business to our staff, and they have a vested interest in making sure that your businesses run correctly. And they now have more tools at their fingertips so they can do that efficiently.
I think that becomes the key.
How do you augment the business with technology – not forcing the client to necessarily have to self-service unless they choose to – and then growing that strong business partnership [by] having the digital capability with the human expertise to be able to navigate the complexities a bit better.
That I think is the magic ingredient – being able to use technology to cement that relationship and not replace it.
CIARAN RYAN: Just quickly here, I would imagine that the kind of insights that you can get from this for the benefit of the clients is going to be quite fascinating going into the future. We’re talking about the future of banking here.
You’re not just going to be processing and recording what the customer has done in terms of historic transactions. You’re going to be giving them very, very deep insights, knowledgeable insights into their business. Would that be a fair comment?
DEBORAH FENTON: Yes, it would be. I mean, we are obviously gathering what they’ve done historically, which means we can then feed that into machine-learning platforms and get it to almost predict what the client should be looking at.
So it’s taking the industry into account, what their current sort of transactions are. Then you can start coming up with ideas as to how they could grow their business forward and how they could start changing and augmenting things.
We also do have an area where we are looking at playing back some of this data to clients – which they can use almost as a business information area – because we have quite so much of their data.
But just from a partnership perspective and helping the clients navigate their way forward – bringing them back to trusting their banker and being a trusted advisor and partner – we’ve got a lot of that depth of knowledge that we can now start sharing with the clients because we’ve been gathering it from so many sources and we’ve got such rich data that can then be used.
CIARAN RYAN: Okay, we’re going to leave it there. That was Deborah Fenton, head of onboarding and servicing for the mid-corporate market at Nedbank Business and Commercial Banking.
Thanks very much for your time, Deborah.
Brought to you by Nedbank Mid-Corporate.
Moneyweb does not endorse any product or service being advertised in sponsored articles on our platform.
#future #banking #digital #human #touch