Imran Khan, head of Global Digital Experience at TD and president and CEO of UGO Mobile Solutions, reveals how to make life easier for consumers.
Global Finance: How have application programming interfaces (APIs) helped you make better use of consumer data to provide your customers with improved products and services?
Imran Khan: Our customers want digital solutions, and we are focused on ensuring they can choose the applications they want, knowing their financial data is secure. As TD continues to innovate and create new kinds of digital customer experiences, APIs will help TD meet that customer demand.
Our new data-access agreement with Finicity is part of the acceleration of our work to create a technology infrastructure that will ultimately give our customers more control when they share their financial data to access third-party digital services outside TD. With customer consent, TD will deliver a customer’s financial data to Finicity through APIs that may eventually eliminate the need for customers to share their banking login ID or password in order to access third-party financial products and services.
GF: What changes have you witnessed in the way your customers have approached digital services in the past six months, and how has this steered your digital strategy?
Khan: Throughout this pandemic, we are making sure banking is easy, convenient and available for our more than 14 million active online and mobile customers. We tripled our digital capacity for customer-facing capabilities such as mobile deposit and email money transfer, and we’ve created digital properties that help customers with simple transactions and access to information. We are seeing significant digital growth across all our customer demographics, and an increase in digital engagement by our existing users.
In the height of the pandemic, from mid-March to the end of April, when we were encouraging customers not to come into branches, we saw a 30% lift in Canada in digital engagement and a 17% lift in the US. We are also seeing a significant increase in customers leveraging our digital tools and services. For example, adoption of TD MySpend, our mobile money management app, is up 30% year-on-year; and customer inquiries through TD Clari, our authenticated chatbot, more than doubled year-on-year.
GF: What changes do you predict for retail customer experiences, and how are you marrying this with customer expectations?
Khan: We are focused on reimagining the banking experience across our digital and physical platforms. In many ways, Covid-19 accelerated the journey we were already on.
We continue to enhance our digital capabilities to provide customers with connected experiences and the ability to manage their finances across all of our channels, including our phone channel, online and mobile channels, and in our branches. Some of our new-to-digital customers, who may have been initially hesitant to use digital tools, have now found convenience and simplicity in banking through digital channels.
We understand our customers are relying on a range of Covid-19 relief services, including government relief for small businesses and payment deferrals for auto loans, credit cards and mortgages. To help our customers access the resources they need, our teams quickly developed digital applications to make it easier for our customers to apply for and receive these vital services. We launched a chat solution in EasyWeb, providing an alternate channel for personal banking and credit card customers to get assistance from a live TD agent. In the US, we created a digital loan application for the Paycheck Protection Program and introduced a new virtual assistant that uses conversational AI [artificial intelligence] to provide real-time responses to customer questions.
At TD, we have built an innovation ecosystem that allows us to develop and deliver best-in-class experiences for our customers. We will continue to grow those capabilities and support, connect and serve our customers in the channels that work best for them.
