Tech-savvy and digital consumers don’t wait for business to catch up. Spoilt for choice, they have high expectations of engaging or making purchases from anywhere, anytime.
The much-hyped digital transformation is no more evident than in the finance sector, where banks and financial institutions globally are embarking on large digital transformations to ensure they remain competitive amongst their peers whilst warding off the threat from non-traditional lenders and bug tech companies like Apple, Samsung and others.
Along with the digital shift, the role of the retail or branch network is also shifting, aligning to offer customer’s an omni-channel experiences – the same “look and feel” across all the channels and touch points.
With predictions that as many as 40% of all branches closing in the next decade, bringing the physical branch into the digital banking model is where LiveBank – a leading virtual banking solution developed by Polish based fintech company Ailleron – is putting the human face-to-face interaction in the digital channel by delivering all the interactive customer engagement and features from the physical branch to customers across all their devices.
As the LiveBank partner in Asia, with its “meet your clients every time, everywhere” promise, Geniusto is seeing significant interest among major banks across Singapore, Malaysia, Philippines and China.
LiveBank has grown since first deploying in 2014 with mBank in Europe, to develop an impressive client base with deployments on all continents and a presence in all major global markets. And it is already being rolled out to thousands of banking customers across Asia offered by Australian based smart technology enabler Geniusto, as Managing Director and founder Shane Hermans explains.
“We are seeing that in the very competitive Asian market, banks are looking to LiveBank as the key component in their capability to servicing their customer in the digital channels. This is not only for existing markets but also as a way to expand or deliver products to new markets without the need for new retail branches. We have banks looking to deploy LiveBank across both retail and wealth portfolios to offer their customers a fully secure end-to-end capability in the digital channel, reducing the need to visit a branch.
“Conversations between businesses and their customers are now taking place everywhere, on mobile phones, tablets, computers, TV, wearables – so now it’s even more important to manage communication channels with a clear and consistent service across multiple platforms.”
Standard Chartered is leading the way, having deployed LiveBank as virtual branch capability to Singapore and Malaysia in June 2016, and expanding this to Hong Kong, Taiwan, and most recently China – resulting in the largest roll out of video banking globally. Customers of the bank – which has more than 1,200 branches in over 70 countries – are offered LiveBank for online servicing of their retail and wealth products.
“To succeed, businesses must move with their customers’ expectations on how they can communicate with their bank and at their convenience,” Mr Hermans said.
“With video banking, customers can speak with a banking consultant via chat, click to call or over a secure video connection from wherever they are located, seamlessly from the bank’s web or mobile apps.
This allow customers to do almost anything they can do in a branch, from servicing to offering end to end transactions and sales to occur including account opening, signing up for new products such as credit cards, personal loans or even a mortgage.”
Geniusto operates throughout Australia and the Asia Pacific Region, providing cutting edge solutions to a range of sectors including banking and finance, healthcare, aged care, hospitality, telecommunications and outcourcing.