Transforming through technology

The problem that we've been looking at is our onboarding journey or our welcome to the bank journey for our current account customers. They crystallised at a meeting in the middle of June with Helen Bierton and her leadership team.

And we took a decision on that day that we were going to look at our journey and we were going to compare it to one of the fintechs.

And so at that meeting in live, we opened a current account and then spent a couple of hours looking at what they did, what we did and thought around the gap and how we get parity.

The end of that meeting, Helen sat down with me and said how about by next Friday getting a signed off journey and challenging ourselves to get that new journey live by the end of September. We've never done anything quite that fast before.

It normally takes at least a couple of months to get a journey signed off and so we had to work quite differently to achieve that outcome.The big difference was getting everybody in the room.

So we had products, customer solutions, customer connections, legal design, risk, and we workshopped it for a week, had quick escalation meetings.

And in terms of some of the problematic areas around risk appetite compliance, we did get a signed off journey that we could then give our engineers and give them the best chance to code that and deliver that for the end of September.

What we had to do in order to release this new beautiful version, if you will, of the app to uplift the user experience was to build on that incrementally behind the scenes, but without damaging the existing journey or putting that at risk.

It's the first big epic that we've had to do on the platform 2.0 where there's been no overhang from before that.

So engineers now writing all the tickets, we have to learn how to write those tickets in a way that makes sense as a team and come to a consensus.

The best thing about being in the platform overall is actually everyone's desire and determination. We all know what we want to get to.

We know the OKRs, everybody's aligned to go get that and everybody wants to deliver faster and find quicker ways to deliver .One of the most inventive feature in the app is the chip based verification of the passport. The application starts with asking the customer whether they've got auk passport and where they do.

We effectively take a picture of the passport and then we automatically extract the data so the customer no longer needs to type their name and date of birth and nationality.

We extract all of that from the passport and we read the chip using the near field communication in the phone.

We go on to taking a selfie to make sure that the person that is carrying the passport is the same one that has got a picture on the passport.

Now this is the first to market and no one else has got the cheap base verification. Historically, this type of development would take 9 to 12 months and we were looking to try and do it in three months.

So we've had a few hiccups on the way. We had some issues with releasing the code, but it's gone in successfully.

We've got some early signs of how customers are using that journey and our satisfaction levels are really high. So broadly, 90% of customers that are surveyed that go through it have said that they've found it very, very easy or very easy to do business with us.

The collaboration between the teams has been absolutely fantastic. It's been brilliant watching business and platform work together hand in hand and not just within everyday banking, but across the broader consumer relationship space as well.

And that's all because of the bold decision making, the challenging of the status quo and adopting our rapid decision making model.

When I take myself back to that boardroom in June, when we were looking at the journey and the vision of where we wanted to go to, there was some self limited beliefs from my perspective of I am not sure we can do this this quickly and I haven't worked out a plan how to do it.

The team have done a fantastic job in terms of working collaboratively and I think it's strengthened our relationship with the product team.

The relationship between the engineers, the designers has all been strengthened as a consequence of this and and actually it's given us a new view and perspective on what we can do moving forwards and that we shouldn't be constrained by how we took in the past. We can be much faster and quicker by working together.