Digital has become the synonym for the
banking sector. While many banks have been trying their best to offer seamless and swift service to their customers, a few banks are also thinking of creating customised products for their customers.
Sunil Soni, CGM-IT,
CIO, explains how
PNB is building seamless customer engagement and how they go for digital adoption considering the large presence of the banks.
Customised products
“There was a time when a bank would create a product, then go to the market and look for adoption. Given everything that has been going on in the industry, times have changed now. We need to prepare a tailor-made product and then relevantly place it in the market so that the adoption is effortless and does not create any kind of hindrance,” said Sunil Soni, CGM-IT, CIO, Punjab National Bank.
But it’s not easy, as Soni says, “A lot of market research and time goes into preparing a tailor-made product for the benefit of a segmented customer base, it is not the case of ‘one shoe- fits all’.
Discouraging customers from branch visit
As digital usage progresses, the bank would like to discourage customers from visiting banks.
“In today’s scenario, the PNB is following the type of work culture where we discourage footfall at the branches and encourage a do-it-yourself kind of an approach,”
He added that to achieve this goal they are focusing on emerging technologies.
“We are adopting technologies like machine learning, data analytics. AI and RPM, one by one. However, if you look at providing solutions, it is important to have an interplay of all these facilities,”
With a great customer base, comes great responsibility
PNB, being the second-largest PSU bank in the country, has around 11,000 branches across different geographies. Also, the bank’s wide customer base includes people from deep rural areas as well as those living in metropolitan cities. Serving such customers digitally is a big challenge.
“If we do it in the metropolitan cities, we would create a rich product like the ‘PNB one mobile banking App’. However, in a rural area internet or receiving good bandwidth could be a challenge, even availability of a branch could be a question, in such case we will have to prepare a business model that runs on a very thin network, like ‘PNB Lite’ that provides all the basic services that the people from that segment will require,” Soni said.
Banking on the millennial
Soni adds that customer engagement is the key.
“Customer engagement is the utmost priority. If banks create products and there is minimal adoption then the whole work and the capital goes to the drain and also loses an opportunity of the potential revenue,”
For PNB the millennials are the large customer base which is also the target base of customers for all the BFSI companies.
“Almost 60% of all the transactions at PNB are done by millennials. This segment doesn’t have time to walk back and look at our brick and mortar structure. We are focusing on developing a product that provides everything to our customers under one umbrella through our Mobile Banking App. Engaging with the service providers, merchants and sellers and even with companies like Swiggy will help millennials to make use of the app for almost all their day to day requirements, It will be an enriching marketing experience for us as well,” Soni explains.
PNB building modern banking
Soni says that the bank is using the topmost technologies. Currently, voice bots are being used for the PNB ONE app. Bots are encouraging collaborative banking where the availability of a customer service executive does not affect the banking experience of the customer and fastens the response time for a query. Some of our call centres or phone banking services are also being augmented with bots to provide utmost convenience and make banking faster. We are actively looking at the constant feedback from our customers on the websites and improving upon every suggestion. The complaints registered by the customers are resolved on a priority basis,”
Changes to the traditional IT model
“We have shifted from a conventional waterfall model to an agile model of programming. Earlier it would take us months to prepare a model and launch it, whereas today it hardly takes us a few weeks to bring about a small change or introduce a new product completely.” Soni explained
This article is based on the fireside discussion with Sunil Soni, CGM-IT, CIO, PNB at ETCIO BFSI Conclave.