PHOTO CREDIT TKAt Gulf International Bank
(GIB), which took six awards this
year in the Corporate/Institutional
categories, the Covid crisis has
helped focus leadership’s priorities
on digital transformation.
“[The crisis] has put greater
emphasis on the financial viability
of key digital initiatives,” as well
as “the need to prioritize aspects
of the strategy that deliver value
in shorter time frames or address
items with large opportunity costs and previously unforeseen
regulatory changes,” says Dharmesh Mehta, product consul-
tant, Global Transaction Banking at GIB.
INNOVATION ENCOURAGED
Russian digital-only bank Tinkoff won numerous awards in
Central and Eastern Europe, including Best Online Treasury
Services on the Corporate/Institutional side, and several more
in the Consumer categories. In May, Tinkoff launched a service
called Surviving Quarantine, which offers discounts on digital
services and subscriptions for film streaming, home fitness, audio
books and online courses. Thanks in part to Covid-necessitated
lockdowns, this lifestyle approach to financial services has been
a success. Tinkoff reported 1 million new current accounts in
the first three months of this year.
Standard Chartered, which won seven country awards as well
as Africa-wide wins for Best Information Security and Fraud
Management and Most Innovative Digital Bank, built on its suc-
cessful digital retail bank launched in Côte d’Ivoire in 2018 to
launch the same customer data integration platform in Uganda,
Tanzania, Ghana and Kenya in the first quarter of last year. The
platform onboards clients in under 15 minutes and provides 70
of the most common service requests. Improvements to the
platform include QR code and peer-to-peer payments, loan
and overdraft facilities and instant fixed deposits.
At Citi, which won a slew of awards around the globe,
Tapodyuti Bose, global head of digital channels and data for
Citi Treasury and Trade Solutions, stresses the importance of
working with clients to invest and innovate in areas that best
serve their current and evolving needs.
“This has led us to roll out a number of innovative offer-
ings across our digital channels and data solutions,” Bose says,
including digital onboarding, an expanded catalogue of APIs
to support real-time banking and new business models, greater
insights from leveraging data, and embedded biometrics that
provide greater security with less friction.
It’s the same for Bancolombia, which won two awards each
in the Corporate and Consumer categories, in addition to the
country award for Colombia. “Keeping pace with customer
needs via digital innovation is the
best way for banks to remain-
competitive,” says María Cristina
Arrastía Uribe, business vice pres-
ident at Bancolombia.
“Nowadays, corporate cli-
ents are increasingly agile, have
greater access to information
and face constant digital trans-
formations that lead them to
seek more-sophisticated finan-
cial partners with the best value
offers,” Arrastía Uribe says. “This includes a much greater
speed in responding to their needs. In this sense, banks must
continually work to improve their offer with digital products
and services that make them relevant to the daily happenings
of corporate clients.”
In an increasingly demanding environment, with customers
giving greater priority to security, analytics, real-time informa-
tion and ease of use, banks must adapt to customer needs and
develop products and services to differentiate themselves from
the competition.
“One of them in Grupo Bancolombia’s digital strategy,”
Arrastía Uribe says, “is the user experience, as the means and
the way to get our clients to prefer and recommend us based
on four attributes: user friendliness, enjoyable experience, reli-
ability and timeliness.”
It’s also part of the banks’ responsibility, she says, to assist
their clients in shifting business processes to digital, by offering
a comprehensive platform of digital assets to allow clients to
manage their processes more simply, efficiently and securely.
“For this reason, at Bancolombia we strive to enable our
services in an integrated and consistent manner,” says Arrastía
Uribe, “thereby facilitating self-management while constantly
seeking to offer a multidimensional platform with modular and
scalable solutions.” The goal is to support corporate clients in all
their business processes, from beginning to end. “This is how
we fulfill our goal of being accelerators in the transformation
process of our clients,” she says.
In contrast to the 2008 global financial crisis, when banks
were very much part of the problem, this time digital services
are enabling banks to be the good guys, supporting both con-
sumer and corporate clients in important ways. All Round 1
winners of Global Finance’s 2020 Best Digital Bank awards are
using digital technologies to provide banking solutions that help
their clients not only to weather the Covid crisis but to stand
out from their competitors.
“As we are heading towards recovery, customers are already
accustomed to virtual or digital services,” says GIB’s Mehta,
encouraging people from more walks of life to expect digital
excellence from their banks. ■24 | Global Finance | September 2020
ANNUAL AWARDS | WORLD’S BEST DIGITAL BANKS—ROUND I
METHODOLOGY The winners of the
Global Finance Best Digital Bank Awards are
chosen based on entries provided by financial
institutions. Entrants are judged on breadth
of product offerings; success in migrating
customers to digital platforms; acquiring and
retaining new customers; and the use of digital
technologies to improve business processes,
cut costs and deliver other benefits. Each
entry is analyzed by a team of digital and
banking experts at Infosys. All final selections
are the responsibility of Global Finance.