What are some of the major challenges and trends that have been impacting the Banking space lately?

Luboslava Uram, Chief Digital & Information Officer ITALY at UniCredit

Luboslava Uram, Chief Digital & Information Officer ITALY at UniCredit

What are some of the major challenges and trends that have been impacting the Banking space lately? (340)

Banking is touching different services and different segments. My core interest is mainly retail banking and services for individual clients.

The most impactful from my perspective is the change of customer expectation. Customer are becoming more conscious and driving banks towards more purpose and sustainability. They are favouring banks who accommodate their values by contributing to a sustainable future. This start from plastic used for payment cards, paper and equipment of physical channels, ending with reputation on financing green and climate projects or supporting local communities. As bank we must reorganise and redefine the way we structure and design our services, branches, but also to use data, to be able to navigate correctly our offering vs. Customer needs and long-term generated value.

Next challenge in the focus is for sure transformation and optimisation of existing banking operating model. Shadow banking and neo banks, which aim to make banking more accessible by offering customers a cheaper and more convenient alternative to traditional banking. Neo banks with innovative features, cutting-edge technology, and superior customer service are able to serve their customers more efficiently than traditional banks. They seek to enhance user experience by building the products and services application layer on top of existing banking products. As traditional banks we have legacy, funds, customer base, and physical presence that provides assurance to our customers. Nevertheless, we remain with continues challenge to learn from market and combine innovations with our traditional business to provide benefits of leaner and simpler operation to our stakeholder.

Closely connected to previous topic is last trend i deem necessary to mention. Banking as a Platform goes this direction and translates itself into a model in which the bank adds digital services from third parties to its portfolio, offering them on its channels, or opposite is offering own services via open APIs to other third parties which are embedding it into their platforms. In order to be able to operate like this, design of software and its delivery requires different approach, build on APIs, composable applications and customer experience.

What keeps you up at night when it comes to some of the major predicaments in the Banking space? (292)

Beside all the challenges which are connecting to current macroeconomically situation and geopolitical situation, what keeps me up at night would be mainly 3 topics. Cyber security and resilience of digital operation and how to keep and attract best people into my team. You can design best customer experience, but it will fail if cyber security is not part of its design, or operation of services is not resilient enough and is disrupting customers with incidents and non-availably of services. Returning to normal after pandemics, even more effort and sleepless night I must put into making the right people join my team and keeping existing team members as well as new commers engaged, interested in what we are doing for our customers but also to offer relevant path for their professional development and progress.

Easy said but in fact requires a lot of time and effort. I am grateful for having chance to benefit from our internal UniCredit Digital University, which offer to all colleagues’ solid path for training and development based on their role and seniority. Beside constant learning, me and my management team are personally dedicating time to onboarding new commers and become their buddy on the way when joining company. Working in digital area of bank vs. technology company requires to adapt to different processes and respect standards of regulated industry. Often, we are facing challenge from new colleagues who are used to work in much more agile and free environment, for example not having any restrictions on administering own developer’s machine. In our environment this is not fully possible and creates a lot of challenges for young talent we are onboarding. We strive to collect such feedback and make out of it opportunity for modernization of our practices.

Can you tell us about the latest project that you have been working on and what are some of the technological and process elements that you leveraged to make the project successful? (366)

Last year we have started our digital transformation, which is delivers new common customer experience across different products, channels and regions and is based on composable platform design for its delivery.

UniCredit Customer Experience provides to our existing and new customers with an E2E unique, digital native and consistent experience across different devices and all channels, to meet needs for simplification, interoperability, and automation. We have started with focus on customer onboarding and cash loans including credit protection insurance. Digital and business colleagues worked together to design common processes and customer experience for this products and services, which create baseline for its application in different countries and regions.

Based on common process design, we have analyzed on software delivery side, what are components we can generalize and re-use. Those are then developed, and global component integrated on common software platform, integrated via APIs towards individuals core banking systems or touch points.  

Services delivered by now are focusing on customer in Italy, where we have introduced new onboarding via remote channels with innovative authentication methods (video selfie, SPID); automation of documents reading via OCR scan; flexible data capture logic to minimize data input and controls automation in all steps of the process; immediate credit evaluation before final offer display; “Counter offer” proposal in case of initial request not affordable. This customer services are already live for Branches and Contact Center from May, while currently progressive opening in mobile and online banking; finally public website to be released by October.

Main benefits are also automatic decisions have been increased in Italy around 90% thanks to the increased use of data and analytics and credit policy review, while the number of clients required to produce income documentation is reducing from over 70% to under 20% thanks to the introduction of income models. In addition, expected significant time to decision reduction, from average 1.4 days to get credit evaluation confirmation to around 10 minutes in case of automatic decision in Italy, and instant disbursement.

After introductionary experience, we are evolving now design of components to be applicable for consumer lending in Austria and Germany as well as designing additional new components for current account and to it related banking services.

Which are some of the technological trends which excite you for the future of the Banking space? (321)

All the trends are very exciting, but for me and my team priority is outside of technology. We are currently driving digital transformation of our company. If we speak about digital transformation, we pay too much attention to the digital and not enough to transformation. It’s not a technology challenge, it’s a leadership one. You can easily read or to be train on what is technology available, how it works, what it can bring, how to operate it. At the end it is commodity which you buy or use. What is key for making transformation successful is way it is done, organize and the way people are part of it.

This is what is exciting, but better to say challenging me the most now. How to make all people in my team and together with business part of the story, so they can influence it, shape, and contribute. We are working in organization where we can not take time off to design best architecture and methodology and then start executing it. We have to do it in adaptive way along with delivering results and new products for business and customers. It is great opportunity for me and my management team to learn how to combine transformation with quality delivery and stable operation, while on the same time make people enhance their skills and make software design and delivery more re-usable and more open.

We are using adaptive agile approach, where we are in regular cycles looking back and understanding what could have been done better and what has to be improved. Along such approach is my role to make it safe enough for people to declare, that something is not working or was not done best way and create space for them to improve in next sprint. Being the part of bigger result-oriented organization, this is often requiring close alignment with all stakeholder and clear communication on expectations and progress possible.

How can budding and evolving companies reach you for suggestions to streamline their business?

Social network are best place to exchange experiences and discuss way we can learn from each other. I am having a lot of contact on LinkedIn which I use often for this purpose, and I am pone for new ones.

Customer Experience

Agile

Retail

Contact Center

review