Beyond Bank achieves transformation with Microsoft solution in a Southeast Asian first

Beyond Bank is one of Australia’s largest customer-owned banks, with over $4 billion assets under management, 200,000 customers, 43 branches, access to more than 3,000 rediATMs and 600 staff. A mutual bank 100 percent owned by its customers, Beyond Bank uses profits to benefit customers and their communities.

As a financial institution, Beyond Bank uses many different industry databases and industry-specific approaches. This created a complex network of software applications that slowed the bank’s processes down and made it almost impossible to deliver a consistently outstanding level of service.

To deliver on its ambitious goal of transforming the customer experience, Beyond Bank needed to know more about its customers, and it needed to achieve stronger integrations with both internal and external systems. The bank’s ability to capitalise on potential sales opportunities and to deliver a unique, personalised experience was hindered by its disparate systems, which stored essential information in various silos.

This made it impossible to provide a seamless, accurate and well-informed level of service.

“To gain a complete view of the customer during an interaction, the customer service representative would need to switch between a number of different systems and screens, piecing together the information as they went,” said Robert Aitken, Chief Information Officer at Beyond Bank . “This meant the customer service representative was more focused on processes than on building a strong rapport with the customer,and could miss vital information. It could take more than 30 clicks to get the information required.

“Importantly, this meant the bank couldn’t be proactive. We couldn’t see the underlying issues or reasons for customer behavior, and therefore couldn’t capitalise on upsell or cross-sell opportunities.”

Bank representatives could not easily see customer information such as whether the customer had payments due on loan or credit card products, whether the customer was entitled to special offers, what conversations the customer had previously had with bank employees, and why the customer was likely to be contacting the bank.

Additionally, some workflows and processes, such as approving loans, were taking too long due to the lack of tight integration with external databases and the core banking system.

“The bank needed to know more about its customers,” explained Aitken. “We needed a solution that could integrate information from the previously siloed systems across every customer touchpoint to deliver a single view of the customer. The solution also needed to integrate with the bank’s core banking system to simplify workloads and let us leverage potential opportunities faster.”

The bank was looking for a solution with a full suite of functionality, including a consolidated view of the customer’s portfolio; sales prospecting and opportunity support; comprehensive reporting; intuitive, customer-focused processes; and marketing campaign management and automation.

Importantly, the system had to be more agile and lower-cost than traditional banking CRM systems. To achieve this, Beyond Bank wanted to implement a fully cloud-based solution. This was not previously possible due to the lack of local data centers. The establishment of Microsoft’s Australian data centers in 2015 changed that, making it possible for financial institutions to genuinely consider cloud solutions for the first time.

Solution

To achieve the functionality and cost savings it was looking for, Beyond Bank needed to commit to an overarching technology refresh that would deliver significant new functionality.

Beyond Bank worked with DXC Eclipse, a practice within DXC Technology, to select a complete Microsoft Office 365 implementation that utilises the entire Microsoft stack to deliver a seamless, efficient and effective user experience.

With DXC Eclipse development, the Dynamics CRM platform lets the bank’s employees get a 360-degree view of the customer without having to navigate between screens. It presents customer data, business processes and business rules. It is tightly integrated with Office 365 and SharePoint to store, retrieve and coauthor documents related to Beyond Bank customers. It also includes Documents CorePack, a document management solution, and AbelBridge Editable Grids in Dynamics CRM to build on the Microsoft user experience.

Beyond Bank is also adding Azure Machine Learning, Dynamics Marketing, Social Listening, and Voice of Customer to its stack to get a better understanding of its customers and communicate with them more effectively.

Azure Service Bus was used to integrate the CRM system with the core banking system and all external data sources.

Aitken said, “The new solution lets Beyond Bank users view customer history, accounts, correspondence and portfolio information. The combination of tightly integrated applications makes it possible for Beyond Bank to gain the 360-degree customer view it needs, and to act quickly on insights to improve business performance.”

Benefits

The solution is delivering a number of technological and business benefits for Beyond Bank.

Moving to a cloud-based approach was crucial. It delivers to Beyond Bank key functionality and significant financial savings that would not have been possible otherwise. For example, the cloud-based approach means bank representatives can access the system from any location using a touch-screen device, letting them sign up new customers immediately when in the field.

“The cloud-based delivery model means we get upgrades and patches directly without having to wait for, and plan for, an on-premises upgrade,” said Aitken. “This gives us a vastly improved and agile technological environment compared with the one we had previously, with legacy systems that did not integrate fully with each other.”

The increased integration enabled by Azure Service Bus has successfully transformed the bank’s business processes, streamlining them and removing unnecessary manual work. By automating where possible, the bank will continue to reduce the time for common processes such as onboarding and opening new accounts, while reducing the potential for errors.

“A key goal of this project was to put all customer information into a single location,” Aitken said. “We now have that, along with seamless integrations that mean a change made to a customer record in the core banking system is now immediately reflected in the CRM system and vice versa. We’ve reduced the number of clicks it takes to get a 360-degree [view] of the customer by more than 30.

“This delivers a competitive advantage to the bank. We have a complete view of the customer, accessible from any location, along with a range of sophisticated reporting abilities. So now we know everything we need to about the customer, and we can see how we are performing overall in terms of converting more leads into sales, for example.”

Using the various elements in the Microsoft stack, Beyond Bank can gain a truly 360-degree view of the customer. Previously, the bank’s CRM system contained only basic customer information. Now, through Dynamics CRM, Dynamics Marketing and Social Listening, the bank not only gains that 360-degree view, but it will also seek to predict customers’ future behavior (by leveraging Azure Machine Learning). This is a powerful competitive tool for the bank because it can direct resources and funds toward initiatives that are most likely to deliver increased business.

Importantly, the Microsoft solution has demonstrated that financial institutions can dramatically lower the cost of ownership of mission-critical systems. Most banking systems are legacy, on-premises solutions that include significant licensing and support costs. These overblown solutions were necessary in the past but, with the advent of local data centers, Beyond Bank was able to reduce its cost of ownership substantially by choosing the Microsoft stack delivered by DXC Eclipse.

Aitken said, “With the full solution set to go live, staff engagement has already been exceptionally positive and proactive. We anticipate seeing a very strong return on investment in three key areas: sales, efficiency and staff engagement.”

Beyond Bank anticipates seeing a higher quality of intrabusiness referrals, increased sales per customer and increased customer satisfaction as a result of the new system. When it comes to efficiency, the bank expects a reduction in the time it takes to assist each customer due to consistent and streamlined business processes. Staff will have fewer screens to click through, which will also save time and provide faster access to the information they need.

“The solution will give staff members more ownership of the customer relationship. We anticipate that this will lead to improved staff satisfaction and more motivated employees, since they can contribute directly to organisational success,” said Aitken.

In the future, Beyond Bank intends to leverage Voice of Customer to proactively survey customers on any number of topics. The data will tie back into Dynamics CRM, and the bank will use Power BI and Azure Machine Learning to analyze the data and extract insights that it can then act upon.

Working with DXC Eclipse

DXC Eclipse’s team of consultants was embedded into Beyond Bank’s offices for 18 months. This provided the DXC Eclipse team with a deep understanding of financial services and banking processes.

According to Aitken, “The DXC Eclipse team made a huge commitment to this project and the results have been clear. The project team, made up of DXC Eclipse staff members and Beyond Bank employees, has worked as a single entity. The DXC Eclipse team has lived our values and shared a wealth of knowledge about the products with the Beyond Bank team.

“Banking has a language of its own. By embedding the DXC Eclipse team with the Beyond Bank team, the DXC Eclipse staff was able to proactively add suggestions regarding how to get the best possible results. Rather than simply delivering a written requirements document and then developing accordingly, the team was able to work to an agile methodology, contributing equally to outcomes.

“This project is one of the most significant projects Beyond Bank has done in 10 years. This has been truly transformational and a real game-changer for the organisation.”