Awards for Excellence 2019
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Though the Middle East’s banking sector once lagged behind others in digital technology, that has been changing in recent years.
Some banks have made a push over the past year to catch up with the advances that have taken the sector by storm. Among them we may count Kuwait Finance House, which reduced turnaround time on transactions and launched a chatbot to assist customers more consistently.
But no bank has driven these efforts more convincingly than Emirates NBD. The Dubai-based institution, led by Shayne Nelson since 2013, committed to spend AED1 billion ($272 million) on its digitization over the period 2017-2020.
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Shayne Nelson |
Leading the market for digital banking, the bank expanded its contactless payment facilities to include Google Pay last year, while its online bank Liv has gone from strength to strength.
Liv acquired over 10,000 customers every month and secured a 7% customer share of the millennials market in the UAE.
Emirates NBD also introduced new transaction banking products on its corporate banking platform, smartBUSINESS, revamped its fitness app, and extended its 60-second money transfer service to include the UK.
The bank pioneered new technology to improve and accelerate its operations, including the progressive implementation of robotics process automation and artificial intelligence.
All of these innovations came at a price and contributed to the 16% increase in the bank’s costs over the past year. But its cost-to-income ratio, at 32.3%, remains within the bank’s guidance. And Emirates NBD is being judicious about where it spends its money, focusing on the tools that will help it grow on the long term.
As Nelson told Euromoney earlier this year, Emirates NBD’s main rivals today are not the fintechs that scare so many other bankers. Rather, they are large technology companies such as Amazon, Facebook, Google or Alibaba, whose massive data troves make them prime candidates to understand customers’ needs, including their banking needs.
Having come to that realisation has certainly helped the Emirati bank understand how it should adapt to this changing environment, and embrace partnerships with fintechs, rather than reject them as competition. The latest example of that strategy is Emirates NBD’s partnership with SAS, a leading analytics business, to improve the way the bank makes credit decisions.
