Continuous Digital Adaptation: Support the Growing Demand For Digital Self-Service Banking

An interview with one of the speakers for our?7th Annual Retail Banking Technologies Summit ?on 22nd – 23rd February 2023 in Vienna.

What is your recipe for success in banking digital transformation and innovation?

Before looking for the correct ingredients for a successful digital transformation, my experience over the last few years in technology says – be ready for a?transformation which starts but never ends.?The evolution of digital technologies will not stop. Therefore, instead of a perception that we need a one-off digital transformation, I prefer to think about continuous?digital adaptation. Once we have adjusted to the current level of technology, we have just a short window to celebrate and enjoy such results, until new digitalisation tasks emerge. After one digital transformation wave comes another with the need to transform again.

However, when looking at what makes any change successful, I would say having a?good mix of customer focus, people engagement and adaptive leadership?applied according to the different aspects and specifics of each organisation. Learning from our transformation journey over the last few years, success has been supported by:

• Looking at everything through the “ultimate value for the final customer”,
• Engaging people in the transformation effort,
• Understanding key trends and experimenting with the relevant ones,
• Giving space to our team to come up with ideas and proposals, as well as
• Leading with a long-term commitment while at the same time, making concrete adaptive steps.

In addition, I personally love enabling and supporting my teams in these fields. Being result- and people-oriented at the same time feels naturally and absolutely crucial to me. Just as my slogan says: CREATING. ENABLING. LEADING INTO FUTURE.

How does the UniCredit CX look like, and what potential does it hold?

Our Customer Experience is driven by our ambition to provide our customers with an easy and simple access to our products and services in all our locations, across all channels they use in their daily lives. Next to that we always ensure the security of customer data and offer personalised services and real-time assistance.

We embarked on a customer experience redesign journey as part of our strategic plan, UniCredit Unlocked, in December 2021. This has meant:

• Involving product owners across all our regions and countries to design new customer journeys for key products with a focus on onboarding, account services and consumer finance.
• Designing customer journeys as a set of individual steps and actions which can be standardised across regions and products.
• Using a common CX platform across different touchpoints, delivering an upgraded customer experience.
• Designing our CX platform as the basis for the development and operation of different components, which can be bundled together into specific customer journeys, with a high level of re-usability
• Defining a mandatory principle of full openness in all customer journeys which means that integration via common APIs and data exposure are mandatory for any product and each business component.

This approach has the potential to easily be extended to new opportunities, but also to be integrated into other touch points not necessarily owned by our bank. This is done via standardised APIs, which serve to further enhance customer access to our products and services. Meanwhile, it is equally important for us to continue to create standards and scale the development of components and their use across regions, sharing relevant resources and generating network effects for platform extension to new products.

What kind of investments in digital self-service have long-term value for banks?

Our CX platform allows us to reach our customers across all touch points that are readily available. As a significant pan-European bank, we have many different segments of customers, including many of whom may still prefer assisted sales and services offered at physical branches or via call centres. Nevertheless, given the speed of technological change, while ensuring full service for all our customers, we continue to invest into the design and implementation of our self-service customer experience.

This includes investments into data and channel integration to allow us to offer personalised services and in the long-term, better reach our customers exactly when they need our services.

To support the growing demand for digital self-service banking, the API integration of our platform will allow us to offer additional services within our app, further enhancing the overall customer offer. It will also allow for the easy integration of our products into other relevant portals and apps, which our customers are using.

Self-service, or AI-assisted services, are definitely a “future must” in banking, making any investments in this direction an important part of constantly enhanced customer service and experience.

Luboslava Uram is CD&IO Italy and Head of Retail Business Platform at UniCredit,?focusing on creating valuable IT services and processes and managing teams across the Group of more than 1,000 people in total. Luboslava is also a member of the UniCredit Supervisory Board. She has been in her current role since 2021.

Prior to joining UniCredit, Luboslava worked at SAS and CapGemini with a focus on IT sales and IT optimisation. The financial industry has been part of her professional life always, making the international environment at UniCredit the perfect place for knowledge sharing with colleagues and partners and continued professional growth and progress.