Empowering relationship managers with intelligent banking in a digital era

WITH the use of mobile phones and online platforms for everyday banking and wealth management needs being pushed into the mainstream, clients have become more proactive and self-directed in fulfilling their financial needs than ever before. Cognisant of this, the banks continue to ramp up their digital offerings, including providing customers with greater access to information and offerings through digital channels, or investing in improving customer journeys.

While it is evident that client engagement remains core to wealth management and financial solutions, there has been relatively less focus on empowering relationship managers with new technologies and solutions that will allow them to be more efficient and client-centric, according to Evy Theunis, head of customer segments and customer science at DBS.

Transforming roles

DBS wants its relationship managers to have a hand in driving customer-centricity. "DBS has built up strong tech, data and intelligent banking capabilities over time and with such a robust foundation, we could and wanted to do a lot more to enable our relationship managers to provide hyper-personalised experiences to our customers, and at the same time, be more productive," says Theunis.

The bank's intelligent banking engine combines predictive analytics, artificial intelligence and machine learning technologies, and customer-centric design to transform raw data into actionable insights and nudges that are intuitive, unintrusive, and hyper-personalised for every customer.

Typically, employee tools tend to take care of peripheral needs, such as making sure that processes run smoothly. But these tools do not necessarily help with the essence of what relationship managers do: develop or deepen customer relationships by providing best in class counsel and support.

Tapping its strong digital foundation, Singapore's largest bank developed Client Connect - a one-stop tool that addresses traditional pain-points in the customer servicing process, and also empowers relationship managers to provide customers with more meaningful and hyper-personalised advisory, by equipping them with data-driven nudges that allow them to focus their time on adding value and customising banking for every individual customer.

"The aim is to ensure our customers consistently receive hyper-personalised advisory and experiences regardless of where and how they're engaging the bank, whether it's on digibank or speaking to our relationship managers," says Theunis.

In the development of Client Connect, DBS interviewed employees across various roles, ranks and backgrounds to identify their pain points, and set up a multidisciplinary squad in order to look at the business from an end-to-end point of view.

"This left us better-placed to optimise the customer servicing journey. From there, we created a value map that connects business and customer experience outcomes as one," says Theunis.

Value-added insights

While the role of relationship managers is central to deepening relationships with banking clients, they sometimes face a myriad of challenges that hamper productivity.

For example, relationship managers may not have ease of access to a full view of clients' prior interactions with the branches or digital platforms.

Having multiple systems also leads to decentralised information, which is not conducive for facilitating quality and quick decision making.

"Data on its own is useful, but insights are where the true value-add lies. We saw room to support the relationship managers on this front by leveraging our intelligent banking capabilities to cut through the clutter, empower them to hold more impactful customer conversations and also prioritise their day, such that everything runs smoothly and more productively," says Theunis.

Client Connect consolidates data insights across the bank to provide relationship managers with an all-in-one view of the customers they are servicing, as well as provide data-driven intelligent nudges in the form of "next best conversations" (NBCs).

NBC nudges are built using the bank's intelligent banking predictive technology to transform data into useful, relevant, and actionable insights for relationship managers.

"NBCs build on the bank's intelligent banking capabilities to identify and continuously refine the discussion topics of relevance to each individual customer. These are then delivered to the relationship managers, thus sharpening frontline advisory and enabling them to hold more impactful conversations that are tailored to customers' current needs," says Theunis.

Combined with a comprehensive view of clients, profiles and needs, the time taken to prepare for client meetings has also been significantly cut down.

"After engaging the clients, relationship managers score the relevancy of each NBC nudge. This kicks off a continuous learning and iterating cycle, as our insights are then further refined based on how these conversations and engagements play out, thus enabling us to continually optimise and deliver best in class experiences for our customers," says Theunis.

DBS Client Connect was rolled out to DBS Treasures in Singapore in July this year.

It has since generated over 200,000 NBC nudges as of September with relationship managers giving these a relevancy score of 91 per cent. Customer satisfaction scores for DBS's relationship managers have also increased.

The Client Connect system will replace various frontline tools and systems currently used at the bank. It is progressively being rolled out to the rest of DBS's retail and wealth segments in Singapore, and will be phased into Hong Kong, Taiwan, India, Indonesia, and China over the next two years.

A seamless experience

Indeed, the surge in digital banking activity has not let up since the pandemic.

"But not everything can be done via self-service. Some solutions may be too complex to be transacted independently online. Furthermore, when it comes to wealth management, relationships continue to be rooted at its core," says Theunis.

As such, DBS adopts a "high tech, smart touch" approach, rooted in the belief that technology cannot replace the "human" aspect of wealth management, but rather, complement and enhance the overall value-add it brings to clients, according to Theunis.

"By empowering our clients with the insights and tools to self-service, and to easily capture timely opportunities, our clients can then focus time with their relationship managers on more complex, nuanced, and strategic issues," says Theunis.

"This also means that today's clients rely on both digital services and their relationship managers, necessitating a smooth online-to-offline experience for clients," she adds.

The development of Client Connect is part of DBS's aim to take the hassle and complexity out of banking and empower customers to better manage their money, by providing hyper-personalised advisory seamlessly across all its digital and physical touchpoints.

DBS had in 2020 rolled out its intelligent banking capabilities to retail and wealth customers, in the form of hyper-personalised nudges and insights on DBS digibank.

Among the features include customised market insights based on customers' investments and behaviour, shortlists of stocks that align with customers' investment patterns, automatic alerts on price movements of the customers' stocks holdings and notifications about possible financial blindspots such as when unusual payments occur.

The bank's intelligent banking engine currently generates over 30 million insights for customers in Singapore every month, with over 10,000 attributes analysed to generate each insight.

With this focus on intelligent banking, Sim S. Lim, DBS's group head of wealth management and consumer banking, said in 2020 that his aspiration is to hit 20 to 25 per cent growth in wealth and retail investment income, especially as relationship managers come to leverage tools like Client Connect to better understand their customers and become more productive.

Just last week, the bank announced its commitment to further bolstering its digital and intelligent banking capabilities and will increase its investment to S$300 million next year, up 14 per cent from this year.

"It's still early days, but we are confident in the value-add that intelligent banking can bring to the banking industry, and we are in this for the long haul," says Lim.

"We're committed to supercharging ourselves to become an intelligent banking powerhouse that customises banking for every individual customer, by delivering hyper-personalised journeys that pre-empt, support, and address their unique needs."