“It is evident that customer behavior is going to change forever, customers would prefer having minimal interactions with the branch and would much rather be serviced in the convenience of their home through their mobiles or devices of their choice”, said Kashif Amin Thakkur, Head of Consumer Banking at Ajman Bank – UAE, during an exclusive Q&A session with Daily NewsPK and shared his insights on the impact of COVID-19 on the entire economic and financial landscape in the middle east.
1. How is COVID-19 impacting operations? How is your institution reacting?
We are faced with unprecedented challenges with the current pandemic and it has affected the entire delivery chain, starting from our customer interactions to back end processing. The entire industry had to deploy a set of quick measures to respond to the changing landscape including Ajman Bank.
2. How are you supporting and managing your staff working remotely?
Challenge for the banking industry has been even bigger as compared to other sectors because the IT infrastructure for financial institutions comes with an added responsibility of privacy and security and that makes working from home or from a remote location even more difficult. But our bank has been at the forefront of adopting new technologies prior to the pandemic, so we were prepared to tackle this situation a lot better. We managed to continue servicing our clients seamlessly even though more than 70% of our staff were working from either home or remote locations.
3. How are you reassuring your customers and rebuilding trust?
We have undertaken various steps to ensure our customers that not only their financial wellbeing but also their safety and health is important to us. Floor plans of our branches were revised to ensure distancing, all the functional branches under go deep cleaning on a regular basis, we limited the number of clients inside the branch at any given time, thermal scanners were introduced and use of sanitizers, mask and gloves were made mandatory.
In addition, we also relayed a wave of positive massages on social media reassuring our customers of our support and giving them alternative options to bank with us including electronic channels and machines that are available on-site and off-site both.
4. What is your strategy to migrate your clients on to digital channels, since the breakout is affecting day to day banking?
Ajman Bank was already on a digitization journey way before the pandemic hit us and the current situation has only helped us expedite the transition. We have already undertaken major steps towards digitizing all our services and today our consumer banking customers can be serviced for almost all of their banking needs remotely.
5. What digital offerings have you started during the pandemic? And how this pandemic has accelerated your digital transformation journey?
Ajman Bank is one of the very few banks that has an off the counter ratio that is above 90%, that means only less than 10% of all of our transactions today take place through our branches. And the current situation has accelerated this transition significantly which is evident from the sharp increase we have noticed in the use of electronic channels and machines in the first quarter of the year, and this adoption continues to grow.
6. How this pandemic will affect experience of branch banking and other human assisted channels such as call centres? Do you think there will be an exponential growth of digital adoption?
Adoption rates of digital channels are already exponential as evident from our consumer behavior analytics and we are committed to bringing state of the art UI/UX for our customers by deploying cutting edge technologies to give them best in class experience.
7. How do you think this outbreak of COVID-19 will affect the industry? What will it look like?
Gone are the days when digitization was considered innovation, it is a matter of survival now. Consumer behavior has taken a sharp turn towards real-time servicing and instant gratification. Banks that are not ready to adapt will pay a big price in losing market share to their competitors. Sustainability and growth can only be achieved by executing digital strategies that are in line with customer expectations and agility is the name of the game.
