Latin Finance - September/October 2010 - 95

banking technology guide
Manuel Bejarano: You have to be in contact or in touch with the person that gives you the advice and then you don’t feel afraid of it. Louis Bazire, BNP Paribas: I think that the Internet, ATM, etcetera are the best ways to avoid having branches just for transactional purposes. Then, theoretically, we use our branches or agentes or whatever to advise and sell. But, in this case, how do you get people into the branch? The transactional part is also an opportunity to sell. Jorge Otalvaro: If you go to the branch maybe you are going to do some transaction and the people attending you can sell products, but we are trying to identify the needs of the customer on the Internet. And where we identify that the person can, for example, have a credit card we have a campaign there. Ricardo Bustamante Gonzalez: We all have to recognize that the customer has choices. The customer is not going to be grabbed to be sold something if he or she doesn’t have necessity. If somebody asked me, “What’s a key competence of a financial institution?” I wouldn’t say the products, I wouldn’t say the branches, I wouldn’t say even the people; what I would say is the agility of putting Ricardo Bustamante Gonzalez products in their data warehouse, in the prediction models. Because with the prediction models, you know the necessities of your customer, and can broadcast campaigns in order to see who is a real opportunity. But in order to grab this customer, you have to be wherever the customer might want to go, on the Internet, at the ATM, in the branch, and also have to have the right kind of product for that channel. LatinFinance: How do you encourage customers to be more independent, to perform transactions whether an ATM or online, on the telephone even without them perceiving a loss of personal service? Cesar Calderon Herrada: You would give the branch the capacity to educate the customer, because sometimes the lines are huge. But for us the salesman is the teller because when the teller has enough time to talk with the customer, to educate, to offer the customer other channels. We need enough time for the teller in front of the customer, and for this, we need to raise the capacity of the branches. Jorge Otalvaro: We have Internet access in many branches so the teller can take the customer and say, “You can do this transaction faster and easier by...” Felipe Vasquez de Velasco: I think we must separate customers, we want some of the customers to do these alternative channels, but we want other customers to continue going to the branch, because they’re the best customers, they’re high-buying customers, and we want to still sell them other products. Ricardo Bustamante Gonzalez: What we have found is that people’s ages do not define their access to the channels. Sometimes we think: Internet for youngsters, and ATMs for young people, but that’s not quite true. There are many young people, or maybe not young people, but younger people, which do not feel comfortable with electronic channels. LatinFinance: We’ve touched on this issue of segmentation, and communicating to the different segments of your customer base differently. How do you segment your customers efficiently? Ricardo Bustamante Gonzalez: The easiest way is to segment based on income, they have with the bank. But in order to get that customer, you also have to consider their education, and their social status, and that doesn’t always fit with economic status. If you cut them by income, find very defined layers, the typical A, B, C, C+, C-, but it’s not enough, you have to also take a vertical cut. LatinFinance: How do you establish the level of trust in the systems and processes, such that customers feel comfortable in being empowered and going to use online banking or any of these things? Felipe Vasquez de Velasco: It’s very important to have a first experience in a new channel. For example, in mobile banking you must help your customer and say, “Okay,– you can have this channel, use it, try to SMS this letter to this number and you will have your balance. You can have it any time you want it, several times a day.” Once the customer uses it, there’s no fear of the channel and they continue to use it. It’s the same with ATMs.

Felipe Vasquez de Velasco

Cesar Calderon Herrada: We have two different flavors in internet banking. One is only for inquiries, the other is for transactions. If you want to transact, you need a variable PIN. You need to buy a token. You don’t want to buy a token, no problem, you have these channels but only for inquiries. It puts the decision with the customer, not the bank. Ivan Sussman: In Latin America the human touch is important. The branch is going to be there but more as a consultancy or education mechanism. But, transactions will move to electronic channels. As long as security issues are sorted people will start moving to mobile devices.
LatinFinance September/October 2010

Latin Finance - September/October 2010

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Latin Finance - September/October 2010