Jacquelyn Tan of UOB: Investing in personal banking’s digital capabilities
Inside the Sell Side
Jacquelyn Tan
Head of Group Personal Financial Services | UOB
Jacquelyn is responsible for the UOB’s consumer banking business across the region, which offers a wide range of progressive financial solutions to different customer segments.
Combining human expertise with data and technology has enabled us to scale our services more efficiently. The cost to serve has also reduced with increased digitalisation and innovation.
Q. Tell us about your innovation process and UOB’s digital journey.
At UOB, investing in our digital capabilities is an ongoing journey as we continue to keep our customers at the center of what we do. This starts with our deep understanding of our customers’ needs across their different life stages and lifestyles, and our use of technology and data analytics to gain insights into their banking preferences and patterns.
We also use human-centered design thinking to identify potential pain points in a customer’s journey. This enables us to create and offer services and solutions relevant to our customers’ financial needs and goals, which meet or exceed their service expectations. We work closely with our technology team – both in-house and with our FinTech partners – on the co-creation and development of the right products and services for our customers.
We take an omni-channel approach to engaging and serving our customers in a manner they prefer through myriad online and offline touchpoints. We have invested in a combination of data and technology and transformed our physical branch network to enable personalised interactions with our customers. To this end, we have digitalised our processes and were the first bank in Singapore to enable digital account opening for all retail banking products in 2018, offering customers instant and easy access to financial products and solutions.
In 2019, we introduced Mighty Insights, the industry’s first AI-driven digital banking service which provides insights that enable our customers to track their savings and expenses effortlessly, thereby hyper-personalising customer engagement. We also tap the expertise and innovation of TMRW, UOB’s digital bank, to implement the same digital capabilities with speed and scale across our regional markets to provide a consistent customer experience.
In the area of wealth management, we were also the first to introduce a comprehensive suite of wealth advisory tools for the emerging affluent such as our proprietary, purpose-built digital portfolio advisory tools (PAT) that uses data simulation and visualisation. Each wealth adviser uses our PAT to help customers monitor, manage and optimise their investment portfolios more effectively.
Q. How has technology helped?
Combining human expertise with data and technology has enabled us to scale our services more efficiently. The cost to serve has also reduced with increased digitalisation and innovation. Our wealth advisers for example, can engage in deeper conversations with customers and provide more personalized services. By using the PAT, they can provide customers with a view of their total portfolio performance or the expected performance of investment portfolios through data visualisation to help customers make informed investment decisions.
We are also enabling digitally-active consumers to grow their wealth through simple, self-serve solutions. For example, we have democratised access to wealth management services by making it affordable and convenient for our customers to purchase simple insurance and investment solutions digitally through our all-in-one UOB Mighty mobile banking app.
For customers who prefer to interact with us in person, we have also used data and technology to improve their experience. When customers scan their ID as they enter a branch, we tap AI and data analytics to send a personalised solution based on their financial holdings and saving and spending patterns straight to their mobile phones. The wealth adviser also receives the same information so our conversations address the customer’s precise needs. Tapping technology has lifted our productivity and deepened engagement as our customers have the choice to bank according to their needs and in the way they prefer.
From digital payments to self-serve wealth solutions, the consumer banking landscape has evolved. It is imperative to keep up with consumers’ changing needs and behaviors across their life stages.
Q. Do you look for partners or build your own digital capabilities?
After we determine the capabilities we need, we decide on whether to build our own solutions or to co-create with a partner such as a FinTech company. Our approach depends on speed, agility, scalability and scale, and includes considerations such as how we can tap our regional standardised IT infrastructure. Our business transformation teams possess a customer-centric mindset and are responsible for the outcomes and delivery of programs.
We also work with our innovation accelerator, The Finlab, which has access to many FinTech firms. It is a win-win because we want to help these FinTech firms in Southeast Asia.
Some examples of our partners include Prive which we collaborated with to create PAT so that our wealth advisers could help our customers to manage and to track their portfolios. We also worked with Personetics and Meniga to build our digital engagement engine, providing our customers with a personalised banking experience. The engine cleans and categorises large volumes of data which are fed into an AI-driven cognitive engine to identify transactional patterns. Our customers then receive hyper-personalised insights through UOB Mighty to help them manage their finances.
Q. How are you pivoting in this digital age as an industry veteran?
From digital payments to self-serve wealth solutions, the consumer banking landscape has evolved. It is imperative to keep up with consumers’ changing needs and behaviors across their life stages.
At UOB, we promote and maintain an innovative and enterprising culture across all levels and business and support functions. This enables us to attract the right kind of talent with a growth mindset so that we can continually create new solutions for our customers. The collaborative environment also enables us to stay competitive and keeps us focused on our common goal of doing right by our customers.
We also ensure that our people constantly update their knowledge and skills to remain future-focused and future-relevant. In 2019, UOB launched our Better U programme, a Group-wide 12-week-long learning and development programme targeted at honing different competencies such as developing complex problem-solving skills or skills in the areas of digital innovation and data. Other training programmes such as human-centered design thinking help our people to discover the customer journey. The training enables them to understand customer pain points through empathy maps and how to create and test a product by iteration where we gather feedback after building a prototype. This way, every employee can contribute ideas to how we can innovate and enhance our products and services to address our customers’ needs. The more we see success, the more we breed success.
Q. You speak about the intersection between trust and technology. Can you elaborate?
We all see the transformative benefits of using machine learning and AI to automate tasks and mass personalisation in a digital data-driven future but I firmly believe we also need to be guided by UOB’s values of Honour, Enterprise, Unity and Commitment – to earn and to cherish our customers’ trust, loyalty and hearts. This means protecting customers’ data and privacy, building a better experience so they continuously engage with us and delighting them by offering them what they want but do not expect. It is also our responsibility to be the custodian of our customers’ data.