Saturday, 21 December 2024
Techcombank ushers in a new era of AI-powered banking
Vietnam Technological and Commercial Joint Stock Bank (Techcombank) starts a new era of AI-powered banking at its inaugural Techcombank Keynote event.
The bank aims to lead Vietnam with innovative digital and data-led solutions for customers, bringing the banking sector to global standards. Techcombank’s first-ever Keynote event, titled ‘Pioneering Innovation: Reaching for New Heights’, was held on 28 June in Hanoi. The event showcased Techcombank’s most innovative new solutions for individual, business and corporate customers and highlighted how the bank is harnessing the power of data and AI to create meaningful experiences for customers and deliver unprecedented growth for Techcombank.
Kicking off the event, CEO Jens Lottner highlighted the investment made by Techcombank over the first three years of its 2021-2025 transformation plan in the areas of digital, data and talent. This investment has allowed the bank to create unprecedented value for customers and release a number of first-in-the-market innovations. As of today, Techcombank has broadly applied data analysis and AI across the bank and most major systems have been transitioned to the cloud. This puts Techcombank around three years ahead of its competitors in Vietnam and is enabling the bank to harness the power of data and AI to drive unique business outcomes and unparalleled customer centricity.
Lottner said: “This year we have accelerated our drive towards leveraging our digital platforms and new data and AI capabilities to create more hyper-personalised experiences for our customers, and grow our business faster and more profitably than any other bank in Vietnam. We are now redefining banking in Vietnam with our product innovations and personalised experiences.”
Techcombank’s application of technology, its customer centricity, and strong operational and financial performance have been recognised by numerous prestigious international awards over the past 12 months.
Redefining banking with hyper-personalised experiences
During the Techcombank Keynote, Pranav Seth, Techcombank’s chief digital officer, highlighted the bank’s newest innovations that were helping to create hyper-personalised experiences for customers through the bank’s award-winning digital banking platforms.
Through Techcombank Mobile app, the bank is helping customers improve their financial awareness by providing personalised financial management advice and insights, enabling customers to enjoy their money and save for the future. Techcombank has already delivered over 52 million personalised pieces of financial advice to more than four million customers since the experience was launched. The bank’s use of AI and machine learning has been a game changer, delivering more than 100 million personalised insights views in 2023.
Techcombank’s new loyalty ecosystem offers rewards and experiences tailored to individual customer’s preferences and lifestyles. It is already one of the largest and most diverse loyalty programmes in the Vietnamese banking industry, encompassing over 19,000 points of sale with over 300 brands, where customers can earn reward points. Currently, the bank has over 8.5 million customers in its loyalty ecosystem, with around four million customers actively earning points each month.
Techcombank is already driving tangible business value from the personalisation of its customer experiences, for example:
• 700% conversion uplift for select marketing campaigns
• Cross-selling: Conversion rate for credit card acquisition increased by up to 21%
• Active rate for new to bank customers (NTB): Increased by 13%.
Innovative solutions to cater to all customers’ needs
Phung Quang Hung, head of corporate and institutional banking group introduced CCash, a corporate treasury management solution, in partnership with Kyriba. Initially piloted in 2023, C-Cash is being rolled out to all corporate customers in 2024 and is designed to uplift their treasury management to a world-class level. It enables corporates to take a more holistic and integrated 360˚ view of their financial positions across multiple bank accounts and even multiple banks. C-Cash financial data is integrated and analysed centrally to help CFOs make timely and optimal decisions, enhance efficiency, optimise financial costs and yield, and improve working capital.
Nguyen Anh Tuan, chief retail banking group officer, highlighted the bank’s all-in-one banking solution for merchant customers called Techcombank Merchant. This holistic suite of offerings is designed to empower merchants to run and grow their businesses by providing:
• All-in-one smart payment acceptance
• Auto-Earning to earn more from surplus cash
• Easy access to credit for both business and personal needs
• Attractive loyalty ecosystem
• Beyond banking services to help manage and grow their business
Over 600,000 merchants now use Techcombank’s merchant solutions, and this has contributed to a 20% increase in the bank’s CASA balances. Pioneering differentiated wealth solutions Nguyen Xuan Minh, chairman of Techcom Securities (TCBS), explained how TCBS has become the leading securities company in Vietnam by pioneering “Wealthtech strategy”. Under this strategy, TCBS has developed the TCInvest super app and a suite of innovative digital-led wealth management solutions.
Today TCBS serves around one million customers and holds the “#1 spot” in terms of market share among bank-owned equity brokerages on the Ho Chi Minh Stock Exchange, and is in the top three overall.
In Q1 2024, 31,187 customers opened a new TCBS account through the TCInvest app, and the app averaged over 14.8 million visits each month. Through the TCInvest app, customers can easily and securely trade securities, bonds, funds, derivatives and other asset classes 100% online and at the touch of a button.
TCBS has delivered strong profit growth of approximately 40% per annum between 2013 and 2023 while operating costs have been increasingly optimised due to investment in the technology infrastructure.
Harnessing the power of data and AI
Supported by a workforce that includes over 1,800 data scientists, analysts, engineers and IT-related staff, Techcombank is setting the standard and defining the future of banking by offering meaningful and engaging experiences to customers as it transforms into a bank powered by data and AI.
Santhosh Mahendiran, Techcombank’s chief data and analytics officer, reminded that the bank’s use of advanced data analytics, generative AI and large language models (LLMs) underpin its ability to provide new personalised customer experiences to millions of individual customers.
The bank’s integrated data in the “data lake” from over 50 of the bank’s systems and is linked with Amazon Web Services’(AWS) data analytics capabilities to create a bank-wide 'data brain'. This ‘data brain’ is linked to its cloud-based customer relationship management (CRM) platform that provides a centralised 360˚ view of all customer information to empower relationship managers and ensure seamless online and offline customer journeys.
Sitting on top of the data brain and exploiting the data coming from more than 1,000 customer attributes, Techcombank operates 45 advanced machine learning models which allow it to predict and meet the needs of its customers with remarkable precision. Applying this data resources in actual operation, an internally developed AI-empowered programme named LACE, provides the bank’s relationship managers (RMs) with accurate and enriched AI insights and scores so that they may have smarter lead allocation and achieve higher productivity.
Techcombank is also experimenting with how generative AI can build the next level of innovation for itself, and its customers. Partnerships with some of the world’s leading technology companies – Adobe, AWS, Kyriba, and Salesforce – are playing a crucial role in Techcombank’s digital transformation and the creation of new personalised customer experiences.
For example, Techcombank is exploring with AWS how to increase developers’ productivity through generative AI-enabled services such as Amazon Q. This is in addition to three newly built applications using Amazon Bedrock to improve customer experiences already deployed today.
Eric Yeo, Vietnam, country manager, AWS, said: "AWS is proud to be part of Techcombank's digital transformation journey, enabling the bank to access services, AI capabilities, infrastructure, and robust security they need to leverage generative AI at scale and drive innovation, whilst remaining cost-effective.”
Simon Dale, vice-president, Adobe Asia said: “Today's banking customers demand seamless, tailored experiences across multiple touchpoints, whether digital or in-branch. Adobe is proud to be Techcombank's partner since 2022, empowering them to deliver hyper-personalised banking experiences in real-time through our Adobe Experience Cloud and Real-Time Customer Data platform.”
Sujith Abraham, senior vice president and general manager, salesforce ASEAN, said: “We are thrilled to partner with Techcombank on its transformation journey with data and AI to better serve its customers and build an empowered workforce. Unified company data from across systems is critical for AI to deliver trusted and meaningful outputs that can be actioned.”
In bringing the first-ever Techcombank Keynote to a close, Lottner said: “Our unique combination of advanced data capabilities, state-of-the-art digital infrastructure, and top-tier talent enables a growth strategy that is very hard to replicate. With the strong support of our partners and shareholders, we have built one of the best banking platforms in Asia. We are now ready to go to the next level, to compete and win over customers to realise our vision, Change Banking, Change Lives.”
Re-disseminated by The Asian Banker
