OCBC’s Tsien: “How is technology changing financial institutions today?”

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Published on March 23, 2021
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OCBC’s Tsien: “How is technology changing financial institutions today?”

OCBC Group CEO Samuel Tsien shares his guiding principle when it comes to digitalisation and customer relations.

Here is the edited transcript:

One of the guiding principles that I laid down with my management team is that we digitalise the processes, we do not digitalise the customer. The customer still needs to be understood, not only from the data perspective, but also understood from his desire perspective.

The most important thing is, we cannot digitalise a customer relationship. We can use all of the digital tools that we have to understand the customer. But ultimately, when you deal with a customer, you cannot digitalise that relationship. It is not a transactional relationship. Because if you focus on a transactional relationship, the commercial banks will lose out because there will always be some fintech companies who are able to do a better job in that monoline activity with the customer. But the customers do not look at it as a monoline relationship when they deal with the bank. They have that trust in the bank which we need to preserve and it is that trust that we need to build upon so that we have a total relationship. Given that, we still have to make sure that we invest into digitalisation because that creates the better experience and the convenience. But that is not the fundamental driver of the relationship. The fundamental drivers of the relationship are your understanding, your care, your service, and the ability to lead the customer to its next goal.

When I look at technology, we should not focus on what people perceive as the front line, we have to look at the back end and you have to make sure that the technology is done in such a way that it is able to build an organisation, which is a more complete organisation than before.

For the full transcript and video, visit: https://bit.ly/3rq1LrP