A few weeks ago, Alain Veuve, CEO of Parashift, welcomed an expert in digital transformation of banks; Mr. Christophe Makni, Internal Managing Consultant (Lean, AI, Automation) at Basler Kantonalbank (until 31/01/2022).
Christophe Makni was in charge of process management, improvement, and automation. He was also involved in the Artificial Intelligence activities of the Kantonalbank association. This digital leader, who is now head of Business Operations at Migros bank, also teaches process improvement, innovation, and leadership classes at the University of Applied Science in Northwest Switzerland.
During the twenty-minute exchange, Alain Veuve and Christophe discussed the new realities of supply and demand of the banking market in a period of the pandemic and the sector’s future.
We have selected for you our top 3 best quotes & topics with convenient timestamps to jump right into the discussion:
1° As Alain Veuve explains, banks have never really been known for being visionary in terms of digitalization. However, it seems that things are starting to move. He then asks our guest his opinion on the current digitalization of banks and what he thinks about it.
“With the pandemic we are currently facing, all the habits of people change. People work from home, consume from home, and order from home. This has shaken up the traditional banking industry, which must adapt by providing online services and helping customers reach their financial goals.
But the competition is enormous because new digital banks have appeared. In every country, it exists some good examples of Neo banks.
For example, Zak’s 100% online bank belongs to Bank Cler. The other one I can give comes from my students. I’m teaching a class where I ask them, every semester, what is their favourite bank. The answer? “Revolut.” Revolut is a new bank from the UK. It is the favourite bank in Europe for all young people. Why? They get for free all traditional services, which they would need to pay for a traditional bank.
So as a traditional bank, either you adapt, offer value, and continue offering excellent products and key value. In the long-time business will be very difficult. So, I think banks are transforming themselves right now. They’re working on that actively. And it’s super interesting to be part of this transformation, which is happening now.”
Christophe Makni
2° In an environment where customers seek to access banking services from anywhere (but especially from home) how banks respond to this new and fast changing demands?
“It’s all based on agile development and co-creating features with end-users. We have some customers circles where we discuss what kind of features they expect from the product. Then we develop that based on what they want.
So, product management is evolving from traditional product management into Lean product management, where we involve customers. They give feedback, and we develop what they want in sprints – traditional agility -.
The challenge now is really to understand how to create value for customers and a valid business model to make it profitable in the long term.
So, it’s easy to go online, it costs money, you can go online, but you need to create value for customers, and they need to pay for that value so that it’s good for both. Otherwise, they lose money in the long term. It’s a tricky business, but it’s fantastic to deliver rapidly, and this agility is here to stay. This digital transformation is the future. But banks need to increase the speed and value because customer requirements are changing. Now, they get everything for free on the internet and immediately. So, they raise the bar on what they can get from their banks.”
Christophe Makni
3° What do you think about the current state of the digitalization of document processing in the banking sector?
“At Basler Kantonalbank, for example, we are digitally processing documents. In the past, we had some traditional physical paper. We brought that with our technical technological partners into the digital level, which helps us extract data automatically from the documents, faster offering better customer service. That’s the kind of example I see now happening in our bank and our colleague banks. And I think in the future will go directly in this kind of digital scenario where customers will not send us as much paper but will be able to do the change that they want on their E-banking up per click instead of wasting some time, you know, printing out documents sending out.”
Christophe Makni
To understand in more detail each theme discussed in this podcast, we advise you to watch the entire video. ????
Thanks to Christophe Makni for sharing his experiences and ideas on the subject.
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