World’s Best Digital Banks 2024—Round 1

In the regional sub-category in consumer and corporate banking, the winners excelled at tailoring customer journeys. These journeys were powered by open banking, clearly defined ecosystems, and artificial intelligence (AI), which enabled the banks to deepen their relationships with customers.

Bank of America (BofA), which won three of their awards in the consumer regional sub-category, including Best User Experience (UX) Design, introduced new digital capabilities to support consumers’ car shopping last year. This includes prequalified auto financing, with the customer able to calculate how much they would be able to borrow and estimate their terms—all with no credit score impact. Using BofA’s Digital Car Shopping tool, customers can compare, budget, finance, and purchase their car. Improved search functionality, electric vehicle inventory filtering, loan-application integration, and in-platform reviews from Carfax, all help customers buy the car that’s right for them. Clients looking to move to a new house can use the BofA Real Estate Center to search properties, check home values, and engage with real estate brokers; while the Digital Mortgage Experience enables them to conduct their entire mortgage application digitally, with access to lending experts at every step.

Multiple-award winner CaixaBank offers a fully digital, independent, after-sales experience for managing home, vehicle, and health insurance policies in real time through the CaixaBankNow app. The app also provides a will-making service. Thanks to strategic agreements with other leading companies in their segments, CaixaBank can offer customers the best solutions, adapted to their needs.

“Seamless integration with ecosystem partners is paramount in delivering a holistic and personalized customer experience,” states a CaixaBank spokesperson. “The quality of the partner solution is crucial, as it directly impacts the service and product offerings available to customers. Equally important is compliance, ensuring that all integrations adhere to the highest standards of regulatory and security requirements.”

TD Bank Group is the winner of six consumer regional sub-category awards. Montresa McMillan, senior vice president for Enterprise Digital Strategy, Innovation and Payments, Change, and Operational Excellence at TD Bank Group, says that customers are at the center of everything and that building personalized digital experiences helps empower them with actionable insights tailored to their needs. “We want to be able to serve every customer segment—through every life moment—and we can achieve that through personalization.”

The TD Bank app is an example of how the bank puts this orientation into action. “We’re utilizing predictive AI to send digital nudges warning customers of predicted low balances, based on spending history and upcoming payments,” explains McMillan. “These nudges are sent two weeks in advance of anticipated shortfalls and direct our customers to options that can help them make decisions to improve their financial well-being.”

Qatar Islamic Bank (QIB) went through a significant digital transformation in 2023—introducing over 50 new digital features across channels to improve the digital experience for all customers. These features include the QIB Lite app; SoftPOS solution; digitized debit, credit, and prepaid cards; QIB Marketplace; Travel Mode; and Carbon Emission Tracker.

Mapping customer journeys and enhancing user experience are no longer reserved for consumers as banks seek to provide their corporate clients with the same seamless digital interactions they enjoy in other areas of their lives. This is made possible thanks to AI, application programming interfaces (APIs), and the agility provided by cloud-based services.

Bank of Georgia (BOG) won a dozen corporate/institutional regional sub-category awards and five consumer regional sub-category awards, thanks to a slew of advancements in business mobile and internet banking in 2023. From streamlined loan approval to automated AI-based models and enhanced digital onboarding, a diversified digital offering featuring lifestyle products, and digital tender guarantees for business, BOG is ensuring that its ecosystem can meet clients’ needs. To help further its open banking intentions, BOG also intends to introduce digital business registration in partnership with Georgia’s Ministry of Justice.

Vietnam’s Techcombank has broadly applied data analysis and AI across its business and transitioned most major systems to the cloud in order to provide hyperpersonalized customer experiences. The bank collaborates with AI experts to analyze billions of data points using machine learning to better understand customer needs, from daily transactions to mobile app use. Techcombank says a “data brain” adapts itself to each customer’s unique circumstances across all interactions on every channel.

AI is also being used to provide anti-money laundering (AML) protection. Taipei Fubon Bank—winner of Best Information Security and Fraud Management as a corporate/institutional sub-category for Taiwan and Asia-Pacific, Best Information Security and Fraud Management, and Best in Transformation as consumer regional sub-categories for the region—has developed Taiwan’s first AI AML system to monitor transaction risk by minimizing false positives. The “Owl Detect, All Detect” project uses big data and robust computational power to reduce false-positive incidents by 45%.

Bancolombia is a multiple corporate/institutional and consumer regional sub-category winner. The bank has integrated AI and data analysis to revolutionize both customer experience and operational efficiency. Having devised a framework focused on transforming functionalities and on the channels it offers clients, Bancolombia is adopting cloud transactions and APIs to bring greater scalability of operations.

National Bank of Greece (NBG), which won two regional sub-category awards, deployed the Infosys Finacle core banking system in October 2023 to power all of the bank’s small and midsize enterprise (SME) and corporate loan operations and replace the bank’s back end.

Stratos Molyviatis, NBG’s group chief operating officer, said in a LinkedIn post that the bank’s core banking replacement project, Cosmos, is “one of the biggest technology projects ever done in Greece. Technology leaps like that occur in an organization every 15 to 20 years.” Molyviatis explains, “The whole endeavor is fundamental to NBG’s digital strategy and its future vision.”

APIs have revolutionized how banks interact with third parties. Creating an effective API ecosystem is essential for banks that want to enhance their digital capabilities and provide exceptional customer experiences.