Africa
Nedbank Mozambique
Nedbank Mozambique reinvented how it services customers with its client-oriented structure for the brand, people, branches, processes and systems. This strategy has been the pillar of Nedbank Mozambique’s success, growth and unique positioning in the market.
Among the arrows in the bank’s quiver is NedSnap, a robotic process automation (RPA) platform that supports Nedbank’s employees by facilitating more-effective communication and timely results. This floating widget provides immediate visual feedback for a more-efficient user experience and enables different bank departments to generate chained tasks for more-seamless and effective operations.
Other tools include Miyo, which is designed to work with ChatGPT. It provides intelligent analysis and insight on business statistics and strategic decision-making. It processes questions in natural language and converts them to structured query language (SQL) queries so that users can access relevant information without navigating complex datasets.
NedDocs is the bank’s software offering that streamlines document analysis and validation with optical character recognition (OCR) technology and a natural-language processing model. This solution integrates with RPA systems to automate document workflows.
Asia-Pacific
DBS
More global banks are screening new clients these days, and one way they do this is by surfing the internet for potential bad news about a would-be customer. It’s usually a tedious, time-consuming process. DBS Bank, however, recently developed a new generative AI (genAI) tool for adverse-news screening that sifts through vast amounts of information rapidly and with heightened accuracy. It has already saved the bank the equivalent of five full-time employees across Singapore and neighboring regions. It has also shortened customer onboarding times and broadened risk coverage.
DBS also unveiled a new AI-based fraud-detection tool in 2023 that couples a high-tech machine learning algorithm with a more traditional rule-based detection engine. This has improved the bank’s precision and its capture rate by 50%.
The bank continues to innovate in the payments sector, too, including a cross-border QR payment linkage launched last year that lets consumers make real-time retail payments between Singapore and Southeast Asian countries by simply scanning the overseas merchants’ QR codes.
Central And Eastern Europe
Tatra Banka
Tatra banka is usually quick to adopt emerging technologies, and this past year was no exception. It became Slovakia’s first bank to offer digital account opening and digital loans to non-clients through a process that relies heavily on biometrics. Launched in May 2023, the new process had onboarded more than 30,000 new users by year end.
The bank encourages its employees to generate new ideas, and they do so—so many that Tatra recently implemented IDEApp. This idea-management platform employs an AI digital assistant to help collect, evaluate, prioritize and report ideas. This enables staff to know who’s doing what and to track an innovation’s stage of development.
The bank also recently developed a tool to combat voice phishing, or “vishing,” in which fraudsters call consumers demanding important information in the bank’s name. Its anti-vishing protocol uses a push notification sent to a client’s phone with a unique code to prove the agent’s identity.
Latin America
BTG Pactual
In recent years, Banco BTG Pactual developed a digital platform to leverage opportunities in Latin America. BTG Dol is the bank’s entrée into digital assets. This dollar-pegged stablecoin bridges the gap between digital and fiat currencies and is a reserve of value for economies experiencing volatility. BTG has a background in cash and reserve management, and integrating this expertise with blockchain technology has helped elevate BTG Dol as a stablecoin with a higher level of trust and security than existing stablecoins.
BTG is also focused on its environmental solution strategy: first with its impact-oriented reforestation investment strategy in Latin America; and lately, with its minority investment in Systemica, a developer of carbon-reduction projects. With this investment, the bank aims to have a more technical branch to support investments in the carbon markets and environmental assets. Systemica’s CarbonSpore platform provides an online tool that manages and develops carbon-asset generation projects while monitoring deforestation in legal reserves and permanent preserves.
Middle East
Mashreq
Mashreq’s innovation launches in 2023 were as varied as they are impressive. They included a nonresident platform for digital account opening with an Indian partner bank, allowing Indian customers, and very soon other nationalities, in the United Arab Emirates to open an account from the UAE in less than 10 minutes; a leasing platform for the real estate industry; inclusive wealth management services; an automation platform for trade asset sell down with predictive analytics and machine learning; real-time data-streaming analytics for contextual banking; an agency desk automation solution for syndicated loans; and a carbon-footprint calculator.
The bank also excelled with AI innovations, becoming the first bank in the region to release an integrated AI solution for hyperpersonalized insights to improve client experience and revenue growth by identifying opportunities and threats within portfolios. Corporate banking relationship managers, meanwhile, can benefit from an AI-based transaction deviation and early-warning signal system. —GW
North America
Bank of America
Bank of America (BofA) is a leader in technological and digital innovation. The bank leverages its annual technology investments and corporate culture to support clients’ financial needs through improved user experience and products. As a mark of the bank’s progress, in 2023 its clients had a record 23.4 billion digital interactions, an 11% increase year over year.
BofA enhanced its digital banking platform with CashPro Data Intelligence, combining a client’s historical data with advanced analytics to suggest actionable insights, and benchmarking various areas. CashPro Developer Studio provides a solution for flexible, quick integration with instant issuance of application programming interface (API) sandbox credentials and production access. CashPro Chat enhancements extend the bank’s advanced virtual assistant to commercial clients.
“Client experience is very much front and center of our technology, and CashPro Chat now includes the same proprietary artificial intelligence and machine learning capabilities behind Erica—the company’s virtual financial assistant—so our corporate clients can submit queries and get real-time answers,” says Andrew McKibben, international head of technology at BofA.
Western Europe
CaixaBank
CaixaBank pioneered lifestyle banking before most banks woke up to the need to integrate the banking experience with customers’ lives. The bank made several meaningful improvements throughout 2023 to improve customer journeys. These include a custom-pricing simulator, which provides a first-mortgage offer with a personalized price in real time; an option whereby customers can use the website and the CaixaBankNow app to aggregate and view their pension plans held with other entities; a digitized will-making service; and the instant payment of taxes, rates, and fines via the Spanish mobile payment service Bizum. To ensure it meets customer needs, CaixaBank guarantees that all digital products launched on the market have been tested, iterated and validated by actual customers—minimizing risks and improving the user experience without affecting time to market. CaixiaBank also established a Mobile Experience Lab—where employees can experiment with the market’s newest devices and gadgets and perform specific tests on their applications and those of third parties.
