World’s Best Digital Banks 2020 Round 1: Covid Raises The Digital Ante

It used to be that banks viewed digital transformation as something that evolved in fits and spurts, in line with legislation and customer preference. That’s been upended by the Covid-19 pandemic, as remote operation has suddenly become imperative.

Legacy infrastructure has long held banks back, but the need for digital and contact-free solutions is pushing them to find new ways to create safe and efficient services for customers. The good news is that banks are earning praise for helping customers go digital and remote and for making it easier for those under financial stress to secure assistance. Increased uptake of digital services by both consumers and corporates, moreover, is accelerating change.

This year’s Best Digital Bank awards, judged by the editors of Global Finance and vetted by our partner Infosys, reflect banks’ responses to the demands and opportunities the pandemic poses for them. Round 1 includes country-level and regional awards in Corporate/Institutional and Consumer subcategories. Round 2—global winners—will be featured in the December issue.

“Digital has been at the forefront of our engagement with clients for some time, helping clients drive transformation of their businesses to realize new strategic opportunities across commercial business units and treasury operations,” says John Laurens, group head of Global Transaction Services at DBS, winner for Most Innovative Digital Bank in the Asia-Pacific region as well as several other awards.

Covid-19 accelerated DBS clients’ adoption of digital solutions by as much as two to four years in the first half of 2020, Laurens says. He credits this in large part to the bank’s success at delivering application programming interface (API) solutions that enable clients to integrate instant, contactless payment solutions into their business processes.

“Alongside helping our clients gain much-needed access to liquidity and financing to stay afloat,” Laurens says, “implementing API-based services to deliver contact-free solutions has been part of our critical response to the pandemic, as we recognize that businesses have to reduce or eliminate physical interactions. Additionally, given the disruption Covid-19 has brought to global supply chains, we’ve accelerated the digitization of our trade and supply chain financing services.”

Adopting the latest digital solutions in trade finance has been essential to DBS’ clients as they scramble to find the most efficient ways to operate their businesses during the pandemic while searching for solutions that can carry their business platforms into the future. “As the post-pandemic world begins to emerge,” says Laurens, “we expect further acceleration of trade digitization, given the extensive benefits of paperless transacting.”

At 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 consultant, 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 successful 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 offerings 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 remaincompetitive,” says María Cristina Arrastía Uribe, business vice president at Bancolombia.

“Nowadays, corporate clients are increasingly agile, have greater access to information and face constant digital transformations that lead them to seek more-sophisticated financial 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 information 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, reliability 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 consumer 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. 

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.