Valuing the Human Experience

Day Two on the brand-new Sibos Spotlight stage saw the crucial subject of design and customer experience put into sharp focus

Opening up the day, Oisin Lunny, Spotlight stage host & Professor of UX Driven Business at Barcelona Technology School underlined that in a world of more choice and options than ever before, understanding your customers as humans and delivering a great customer experience is vital.

First in the spotlight was Dan Makoski, Chief Design Officer at Lloyds Banking Group who gave a highly dynamic presentation about how his multi-disciplinary human-centred team supports the bank in its mission to ‘Help Britain Prosper’ through empathetic and courageous design. “In our team we have anthologists and sociologists studying human behaviour from a design research perspective, we have design engineers prototyping, and everything in between,” he said.

Makoski recounted how the team has built design research labs for customers and colleagues to come in – not just to do usability testing, but for a wide range of creative activities to understand the relationships people have with their finances and how they interact with products and services. “It turns out that people talk about prosperity in terms of the relationships that they care about in the moments in life that matter to them. It’s not about banking, it’s about people – finance is about relationships, whether that’s business, or family or personal relationships.”

Next, Alexis Vasquez Meissner, Managing Director & the Global Head of the Securities Services Banks & Broker Dealers at HSBC delved into HX – the Human Experience – in banking and how firms need to understand customers on a human level to succeed. “Technology is merely an enabler, but the client experience is a differentiator, and the experience is still fundamentally human,” she said.

“If you take a look across the market, organisations that have the ability to understand the needs of their clients, listening and engaging, are generally the ones that succeed in terms of retention and revenue,” she said. “We’re all familiar with those killer brands. The ones that create personalised experiences that drive an emotional connection with brands. Do these companies use technology? You bet they do. But the technology is there to help deliver the magic – to make your cookie taste a bit sweeter, to make your holiday, or business trip, a little more comfortable and memorable.”

Closing the first session of the day, Vicki Joshi, Director - Customer & Digital at KPMG underlined the importance for firms to take complexity out of experiences: “Happy customers can’t mean more complex processes. We need to start thinking about how we deliver better customer experiences in a more cost effective, streamlined way. To be able to do this, it’s incredibly important that we retain the human-centric focus”. Joshi said that when firms do this it benefits everyone: “Happier customers means streamlined processes, employing technology and talent in the right way, all to deliver better returns on investment, increased revenue and cost reductions.”

After the break, Pete Steel, Chief Digital Officer at Commonwealth Bank of Australia , spoke about how the bank is bringing “non-bank-like” experiences to banking customers by using digital innovation, UX, data analytics and AI to deliver a truly smart digital banking experience, helping customers save money, avoid fees, and make better financial decisions.

Next, Mark Buitenhek, Global Head of Transaction Services at ING , underscored the need for excellent customer experience for banks to avoid the commodity trap and differentiate themselves from the competition. Under the mantra, ‘experience is everything’, Buitenhek drilled into how ING is focussing its efforts, from the top down, to create customer experiences that are easy, personal and smart. The journey ING is making, he said, involves an evolution in the culture and mind-set of the organisation to fully focus on creating differentiated customer experiences.

Peter Neufeld, UK and EMEIA Head of Digital Advisory & Customer Experience in Financial Services at EYs spoke about the role of customer research and service design in helping people make better financial choices. Neufeld underlined the risks involved, saying that, in a digital age, if banks fail to become more customer-centric, they risk losing relevance in the financial lives of their customers. Customer research and service design can transform how we deliver better financial services experiences as banks, he said, providing both positive outcomes for customers and businesses alike.

Just before lunch, Rania Llewellyn, Executive Vice President, Global Business Payments at Scotiabank discussed how the bank has been developing reusable solutions to transform end-to-end customer experiences. Llewellyn told of how Scotiabank has revamped its global payments business in the last three years to focus on digital solutions that deliver a better customer experience. To do this, Llewellyn underlined the need to establish an organisational structure that combines business and technology with a focus on micro-services and a platform for accelerated development.

Opening the final session of the day, Leigh Mahoney, Head of Wholesale Digital at ANZ Banking Group Ltd explained what banks will need to do to build great customer experience in a machine-to-machine world. Mahoney underlined that, in the modern world of digital banking, what makes up the customer experience is changing. He said that in the future banks will need to go beyond traditional customer experiences to ensure that product capability is ‘powered’ by seamless interaction between people talking to people, people talking to machines, and machines talking to machines.

Daniel Daszkiewicz, Chief Innovation Officer at Alior Bank spoke next about how the bank has – in its decade in existence – grown and evolved by implementing a highly customer-orientated model for innovation management. Daszkiewicz told how the bank has developed a structured factory that combines both internal and external innovation capabilities to create new value-based services based on great design and UX.

Turning the conversation to the world of security, Masha Cilliers, Partner at Be AG discussed how great identity management journeys can significantly improve the customer experience. Cilliers noted how increasing regulatory requirements have significantly impeded the consumer journey. Yet, she said, advances in ‘behind the scenes’ methods of identity verification, complemented by a ‘contextual approach’, can help FIs offer consumers the frictionless journeys they desire and maintain security.

Closing the CX day, Rupert Nicolay, Worldwide Services Architect at Microsoft deep-dived into the trade-offs that banks need to make between security and convenience when shaping the customer experience as they on-board, authenticate, interact and transact with customers. Nicolay said that recent technology advances are helping FIs improve outcomes on both sides of the trade-off equation, reducing friction and enabling the consistent application of security measures across diverse scenarios, from transaction authorisation to secure statement and document sharing.