Awards for Excellence 2018
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The winner of this year’s award for CEE’s best digital bank is a global byword for innovation. Founded in 2000 as the retail arm of corporate lender BRE Bank, mBank was Poland’s first online bank and has managed to maintain its first-mover advantage despite intense competition in recent years.
Last year, the lender reinforced its long-standing leadership in mobile banking with the launch of a new app inspired by users. Key new functionalities include Android Pay contactless payments, fingerprint login and a facility to monitor spending patterns.
The new app was one of the 10 most used in Poland last year across all categories, according to market data firm App Annie, and helped boost the number of active users of mBank’s mobile banking service to 1.7 million. In July, mobile became for the first time the most popular digital access channel among the bank’s customers.
Another key development in 2017 was the launch of mAccelerator, a fund with €50 million to invest in fintech startups focused on areas such as cybersecurity, biometrics, process robotization, AI and digital marketing.
Jacek Iljin, managing director sales and processes at mBank, says this is part of the lender’s two-pronged approach to meeting the challenge from potential disruptors.
“On the one hand, we want to provide customers with such a good digital experience that it will be hard for fintechs to compete with us,” he says. “At the same time, we want to cooperate with fintechs and implement their technology into our ecosystem.”
Collaboration with fintechs has already borne fruit in the form of mBank’s video branch, while the lender is currently working with external partners on the development of accounting for microfinance clients and video onboarding.
mBank, under CEO Cezary Stypulkowski, is also a leading player in Blik, the local payments system launched in February 2015 by Poland’s six biggest banks. The service, which allows peer-to-peer payments and ATM withdrawals via smartphones, was a strategic move by the country’s leading lenders to forestall competition from fintechs in the payments space.
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| Cezary Stypulkowski |
“The role of mBank was crucial to the success of the Blik project because our customers are so tech-savvy,” says Iljin. “Without their support it wouldn’t have been possible to build a critical mass of users of the solution.”
Last year also saw the first results from mBank’s decision to partner with Accenture to market its technology to financial institutions outside Poland. In June, France’s La Banque Postale became the first lender to acquire a licence for mBox, mBank’s online and mobile transactional service.
As well as providing external revenues, mBank’s intensive focus on technology has made it one of the most efficient banks in Poland. Despite slightly weak profitability, the lender’s cost-to-income ratio last year was among the best in the sector at 45.9%.
mBank is majority owned by Commerzbank and is a universal banking group, following the merger of BRE Bank into the brand in 2013. The lender is ranked number four in Poland by total assets and has retail operations in the Czech Republic and Slovakia. Since 2014 it has also provided financial services to customers of Orange in Poland via retail mobile bank Orange Finanse.
