Banking on a digital future

Some of Australia’s oldest companies have moved tens of thousands of employees to working remotely. How will it affect the future of banking?

NAB Chief Executive Officer Ross McEwan. Picture: AAP

Australia's banks have made the mammoth shift to digital, with some of the country's oldest companies moving tens of thousands of workers to online-only, a change they think may at least in part become permanent.

The banks, largely used to their traditional way of doing things, have been forced to experiment with new software to ensure customers can still get help quickly and do all of the things they're used to doing at branches.

NAB, which on Thursday announced a management shake-up, has more than 32,000 staff working from home and is relying on a raft of technologies including Facebook's Workplaces platform, and cloud security provider Zscaler, to try and maintain customer service levels.

Chief executive Ross McEwan said that NAB was able to shift most of its office-based staff to home-based working in three weeks, and has now switched on new communication options including a WhatsApp chat for customers, and an iMessage chat support option for iPhone users. They’re options that will remain available for NAB’s millions of customers.

“As we work through the coronavirus crisis, constant and ongoing communication with our colleagues is absolutely vital so they stay connected, engaged and have all the information they need to keep serving our customers," Mr McEwan said.

"As the situation changes, and rapidly, we need to be able to communicate just as quickly across whatever device our colleagues are using.

“Importantly, Workplace allows us to hear from our customer-facing bankers immediately, so we can make fast decisions that ensure we are responding for our customers.”

Mr McEwan announced Thursday that NAB’s digital arm, UBank is now one of the bank’s five key divisions and will double down on customer ­acquisitions.

The bank's executive general manager for consumer direct Paula Constant told The Australian that after NAB launched its support measures for customers, the bank experienced a large spike in contact volumes so it had to quickly ramp up its support for remote workers.

"Our technology team moved quickly and through secure remote access using Zscaler for both cloud-based and on-premise applications we’ve been able to ensure our 1000-strong contact centre team – which are all Australian-based – can continue serving our customers. More than 32,000 staff are now working from home, including nearly all of our call centre teams," Ms Constant said.

“On top of making sure we had the technology we needed we’ve also redirected more than 800 people from across NAB by training them with new skills to be able to assist the customer supporting teams during this heightened period."

She added that given the social distancing measures in place, a lot of customers are looking to contact centres or digital banking options to help their needs.

“Even elderly customers are picking up digital banking quickly; a couple of our bankers spent an hour on the phone recently with a 90-year-old and a 105-year-old customer stepping them through what they needed to do for internet banking and they picked it up straight away," she said.

“We’ve had approximately 2,700 passbook customers open a new transaction account since mid-March and 80 per cent of these customers were over the age of 70."

It’s unclear how many employees will still work from home after COVID-19, but NAB will continue to use Workplace and Zscaler across the company.

Workplace by Facebook executive Vicky Skipp said remote working has proved hugely challenging for many organisations, particularly due to the fact individuals all have different working preferences, habits and personal demands.

"In such unprecedented times, NAB has shown guidance, transparency and leadership to help employees successfully navigate their remote working journey," she said.

NAB has also enabled VoiceID, an optional service in which customers are asked if they want to their voiceprint when they call NAB. If a customer opts in to use the service, the next time they call NAB, while they are speaking to a banker, the technology matches the characteristics of their voice to their saved voiceprint to identify them.

Meanwhile 86400, which describes itself as Australia's first smart bank, has selected Slack and Zoom to help run its bank entirely online.

The neobank's chief executive Robert Bell told The Australian he felt fortunate that 86400 hasn't had to grapple with any legacy infrastructure like branches or old technology, so the transition has been relatively smooth.

He said that 86400's tech stack is 100 per cent cloud-based, and that the future remains particularly bright for fintech companies and neobanks who were born digital-first.

"We don't have any of the constraints others have, so we're remained open for business and we're still seeing steady customer growth and steady deposit growth," he said. "And we've planned for this interest rate environment, given we've only operated with low rates."

Mr Bell added that his employees have taken the COVID-19 shift in their stride.

86400 boss Robert Bell. Source: Supplied.

"We've designed it so we can run the bank from anywhere," he said. "We have not a single person in the office now, including our contact centre, everyone just picked up their laptops and headsets and went home.

"Slack for example is used extensively internally, it makes the business cadence really easy and everyone just talks and works as they would in the office, it's just virtual rather than standing around the whiteboard."

Slack's chief product officer Tamar Yehoshua said that months ago it would have been bizarre to imagine certain companies operating without physical offices, but COVID-19 had proven it possible.

She said those companies were well positioned to work more efficiently – and remotely – into the future.

"On paper, it’s hard to imagine that the financial services, fintech and logistics industries can thrive in this way, but they are," she told The Australian. "Through shared channels, we are seeing a massive transformation in how individual companies work together, and how entire industries will reshape the way teams collaborate and get work done, even when they’re remote,"

“The way we work is constantly evolving, and we are currently seeing a shift towards remote work play out across the globe, as many companies scramble to keep our economy moving. One piece of the puzzle that we have not really talked about is how we remain connected with those outside our own companies. Using email, even in the best of times, can be slow. Add in remote work for not just your own team, but your vendors, partners and contractors? It becomes a lot more difficult."