BT helps retail banks address their challenges in the digital networked world

In the age of the digital networked economy, business, society and economics are driven by the information that runs across global networks, with all organisations facing the increasing challenge of thriving in this networked world. For retail banks, this means creating a networked bank to address their main challenges of customer care and quality of service at the same time as reducing costs and complying with regulatory requirements.

To do this, retail banks need an IT partner they can rely and trust, who will enable their business to grow and meet these challenges. BT has worked with many leading retail banksacross Europe to design, develop and manage IT systems and applications, helping them realise the opportunities presented by the emergence of the digital networked economy.

Customer care

Customers have become much more sophisticated and demanding, they expect to be able to interact with financial service organisations at anytime and through the channel they choose. This is why finance companies need to align their organisations and operations around what the customer wants. This customer centric approach consists of building and maintaining a consistent view across all points of contact, including phone, web, email and face to face.

BT has helped many retail banks develop their distribution channels; ensuring optimisation and integration are achieved to give a more consistent and effective experience for their customer. This includes the transformation of the retail bank branch and its technology to enable deployment of best retail practices, a reduction in total costs and an increase in customer satisfaction to improve business output at branch level.

BT and Abbey

One of those customers is Abbey. BT helped Abbey deploy a converged and flexible platform for their branches to support the bank’s strategic development and drive down cost. The outsourcing contract enabled Abbey to sufficiently reduce costs and deploy sales and service tools to their branches. This was an ambitious plan and to make it happen, Abbey needed a single partner to replace the legacy infrastructure and disparate sourcing model. Abbey came to BT “Nobody had ever pulled off a programme on this scale in such a short timeframe. We were a bank in a hurry and BT responded to that. We knew they could rise to the occasion. BT can marshal resources on a huge scale. Few organisations can match them,” said the Director of Technology, Services and Support at Abbey.

Channel Optimisation

BT's global network reach with offerings including: virtualised call centre platforms, outsourced call centres (with over 190 contact centres and 53,000 seats world-wide) and business transformation consultancy, have helped finance customers develop new and optimise existing channels. We provided National Australia Group with a fully-resourced contact centre including leading-edge technology, business processes and front line agents. This allowed the bank to improve its service and the experience of its customers, increasing productivity and client retention whilst significantly reducing their costs.

Security and Compliance

One of the downsides of the digital networked economy is the increased vulnerability of systems and information. A breach of security can not only bring down IT systems but also seriously impact share prices as investors lose confidence. Regulatory bodies and governments have accentuated the issue by establishing new regulatory obligations such as Sarbanes Oxley and Basel II for organisations, forcing them to address enterprise security at the highest levels of management. BT has established an outstanding track record of delivering security and business continuity solutions to customers all over the world, who continue to depend on these services to protect the integrity and resilience of their businesses.

Our flexible approach

BT has extensive experience in partnering with finance companies, using innovative and customised engagement models. Our capability lies in our ability to help our customers re-engineer their business processes. BT has helped many European retail banks implement their retail transformation programmes and manage their enterprise ICT infrastructure. We have successfully worked with our customers to transfer their people, assets and existing contracts to BT and transformed their infrastructure, aligning information systems with their business, organisational and operational requirements.

Agile Bank

BT has an Agile Bank demonstration at their renowned research and development centre at Adastral Park, Ipswich. This demonstration facility enables clients to see at first hand some of BT’s leading edge technologies, experience and capabilities in the finance sector, we have already taken over 90 retail bank clients to this facility. For further information on the Agile Bank and BT or to arrange a meeting, please contact Bethan Deakins, Finance Sector European Marketing Manager at bethan.deakins@bt.com