Randil Boteju, Senior Vice President – Digital Banking and Acquisition at Nations Trust Bank, shares insights into the bank’s customer-centric, digital first strategy to enhance customer experiences for personal banking and corporate banking clients with the launching of the Nations Trust’s fully integrated digital banking platform called Nations Direct. Nations Direct integrates all its digital banking offerings, products, and solutions to enhance customer experiences – be they consumers or business enterprises – at every stage of their life journeys. Also, Nations Direct encapsulates the bank’s sharp digital-first focus to its commitment to customercentric banking.
What are the factors shaping the future of banking in Sri Lanka that make digitalization so vital? In that context, what is your approach to digitalization at Nations Trust Bank?
Consumer behaviours are constantly evolving, and lifestyles and demands are rapidly changing. Sri Lankan consumers are becoming increasingly sophisticated, leading to an unprecedented shift towards digital channels in the past few years for better convenience and value. Changes in consumer behaviour are mostly influenced by the advancements in digital technology and the banking industry is not immune to these shifts.
Banks are also adjusting to the indelible changes in the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic and the unfolding economic crisis. Supply-side shocks, rising interest rates, and spiking inflation have indelibly changed how people live and work and how companies operate, compelling banks to adopt strategies that help their customers get through challenging times while securing shareholder and depositor interests. Frequent policy changes and regulatory developments also exert constant pressure on banks, compelling them to build sustainable, agile and resilient business models. Our approach to digitalization ensures Nations Trust Bank is on top of these changes and challenges shaping the banking industry.
For instance, people today increasingly expect banks to align with their day-today lives. Therefore, banks would have to think about delivering customer-centric solutions. My role is to ensure that our banking products keep pace with the latest technological developments and ever-evolving consumer behaviour in order to create value for our customers and stakeholders. However, we are not investing in technology for the sake of it. We have embraced a digital-first, customer-centric approach to ensure that we are deploying technology to develop digital banking solutions that elevate customer experiences.
Innovation and a constant and diligent effort to continuously improve processes and services are crucial to reinventing ourselves. We have successfully aligned our staff and stakeholders to the digitalization strategy of the bank, which is driven by customer expectations and needs. As such, all our innovations are now digital-first because banking customers demand superior and seamless banking services, one of the many factors shaping the future of banking.
We have also found that technology can help sharpen the focus on portfolio quality and profitability by allowing us to impactfully engage the consumer segments we serve and increase their wallet size. We are creating a unique proposition in an intensely competitive banking industry, inspired by a thought process to ‘Reimagine Banking in a Digital World’.
What are the recent developments in the bank’s digital journey?
In 2022 we passed a watershed moment in the bank’s digital journey with the launching of a single digital banking platform called Nations Direct, an integrated digital banking platform that offers a simple, secure, and seamless omnichannel banking journey that incorporates all our digital banking products from online banking to banking apps, innovative enterprise solutions, and a host of other digital solutions from ATMs with smart features that enable changing money, setting favourite transactions and performing token transactions to a fully digitalized self-onboarding platform we call Nations Alpha.
Nations Direct integrates all our digital banking solutions under one platform so our consumer and corporate customers have access to our entire suite of banking products and services at their fingertips, elevating customer experiences to new heights with its easy-to-use and functional interface. For instance, our Nations Direct Mobile Banking App is ideal for people who always aspire for something more. Built with high-end UI/UX features with customizable interfaces, our banking app allows customers to schedule payments, pay bills and execute real-time transfers, open fixed deposits, pay taxes and other institutional fees, and access all our other banking services within minutes, anywhere, any time. They can predefine transaction limits for peace of mind and monitor recent transactions on cards and accounts round-the-clock. Secured with best-in-class biometric authentication, customers can contact the bank via built-in chatbot, voice and email options. They can keep tabs on their credit and debit card transactions and explore all offers and promotions. All our customerfacing technology has built-in features like Nations eBox and smart statements to enable customers to access all their bank statements with interactive features. In addition to mobile banking and online banking, customers can onboard and open accounts via Nations Alpha or access any of our digital banking services without visiting a physical branch.
For corporate and commercial clients, Nations Direct Enterprise offers a peerless suite of solutions. As a comprehensive payments solution, Nations Direct Enterprise covers various government institutions, tax structures and payroll management. Beyond that, corporates can seamlessly access our trade and supply chain financing solutions, and explore opportunities to expand their businesses. It also incorporates safe and secure mobile and web accessibility, automated payables and receivables solutions and enables easy API integrations to 3rd party applications such as ERP systems. Businesses are concerned about the unfolding economic challenges, compelling them to redefine their business models and refine their strategies; we believe that Nations Direct Enterprise is a game-changing banking solution that addresses all this and more.
What is your vision for the bank and plans for the future?
In the future, we will be competing not only with physical banks but with global tech and financial ecosystems, so futuristically, what we’re looking at is how well we can seamlessly integrate banking into a customer’s day-to-day life without having a customer log into a banking app to perform a transaction, or how we can be present on any ecosystem that they are a part of for unique, seamless banking solutions. These are some of the main concepts we are developing in our customer-centric, digitalization-first approach to adopting technology to enhance customer experiences when they bank with Nations Trust.