“We are noticing a 30% decrease in the branch banking footfall as customers adopt digital channels to ensure social distancing”, said Shehryar Bakht Ali, Head of Retail Banking, Bank One Limited – Mauritius, during an exclusive Q&A session with our editor in Chief on the impact of COVID-19 on overall financial sector.
1. How is COVID-19 impacting operations? How is your institution reacting?
COVID-19 has globally posed an extensive challenge to economic resiliency and sustainability of Governments, Industry Sectors, Organizations and Individuals. Social distancing is redefining “our way of life”. I take great pride in stating that Bank One as an organization took the challenge head on and in a matter of days re-organized its operations to suit the need of the hour. We moved our branch network to 50% operation to ensure health and safety of clients and colleagues in addition to adopting split operations. As physical interaction took a back seat, our teams aggressively on-boarded customers on to our digital ONE experience banking platform on Internet and Mobile rails. As customers faced financial difficulty, we ensured that they could apply for bridge moratorium online & also have access to remote advisory. We furthermore increased our Card contactless limits 4x to ensure safety and health of our clients and colleagues. Being a responsible corporate citizen we also decided to donate MUR 2 for every transaction done by our customers online or on contactless cards to the COVID-19 Solidarity fund.
2. How are you supporting and managing your staff working remotely?
In such a time of crisis in addition to health and safety, communication and engagement is key to maintain effective operations. At Bank One, we enabled VPNs, provided remote devices, registered our colleagues on Zoom and MS teams to start with. Daily health tracking was initiated. Furthermore, Bank One management ensured a highly engaged communication schedule which ensured our colleagues are well informed vis a vis the situation, aware of business updates & clear about the milestones which would trigger a change in our response to the crisis. The response from colleagues across the bank was unprecedented and one which improved our productivity and functional efficiency.
3. How are you reassuring your customers and rebuilding trust?
During the pandemic, customers were looking for advice, re-assurance and servicing of essential services remotely. Bank One quickly reorganized and ensured that customers can easily reach us remotely and can voice out any issues or difficulty being faced. With the economic activity slowing down to a near halt, many customers were looking for banks to provide them with a financial bridge until the lock-down is over. Bank One decided to go for proactive strategy whereby, we were contacting our customers to check on them, support them and made it very easy for those who wanted to request moratoriums to do so in a matter of minutes by applying on our website. 1, 2 or 6 month capital and/or Interest moratoriums were offered to customers subject to their request or need. We aggressively utilized E-News platforms, social media and SMS messaging to keep customers abreast of the developments which was immensely appreciated by our customers.
4. What is your strategy to migrate your clients on to digital channels, since the breakout is affecting day to day banking?
Pre-COVID-19 our ONE experience digital strategy was being executed at pace, however post fact it is moving exponentially faster to meet the needs of our customers. Everything from digital onboarding (Applying for facilities online), E/M-payments to remote advisory & servicing is being rolled out to migrate our customer base on to digital platforms. Education and training linked with digitalization linked incentives are complimenting this initiative and we are experiencing exciting uptake of digital channels across the board.
5. 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?
We are noticing a 30% decrease in the branch banking footfall as customers adopt digital channels to ensure social distancing. As I mentioned earlier, COVID-19 is redefining our way of life and the dust is yet to settle. We must never discount human resiliency and thus I for-see brick and mortar to have an effective role to play in the advisory and relationship banking space. However, It is crystal clear that Digital banking and business interaction is here to stay and exponential adoption of digital will make brick and mortar based banking an exotic experience in not too distant future. Digital banking is going mainstream.
