Supaneewan Chutrakul, Executive Vice President of KASIKORNBANK.

She has shown broad experience and transformational leadership in building KASIKORNBANK as a top retail bank in Thailand and Asia Pacific. The bank is one of the largest and most profitable in this business segment, backed by exceptional financial performance and a clear business strategy.

In KASIKORNBANK, she held various key positions but worked extensively in consumer banking as the department head of consumer segment management. 

Under her leadership, the bank saw significant improvement in retail profit that represented more than half of the total income in the first nine months of the past year. It commanded healthy retail return-on-equity ratio and cost-to-income ratio. It also maintained a healthy net-interest margin level in the last three years.

With a customer-centric philosophy,  she believed in extending beyond conventional territory and redefining banking to stay relevant, valuable, and indispensable to customers.

Over the years, she has also demonstrated resilience by successfully leading the bank despite the setbacks brought by the pandemic. She embarked on a journey to provide customer-centric strategy by leveraging the technological advances of the bank. As a result, the bank saw significant improvements in customer experience, business growth, and operational efficiency. Notably, the bank was chosen by its customers as their most selected main retail bank in the BankQuality Consumer Survey Report 2022 due to its seamless and efficient banking services.

She was also responsible for developing a new digital financial platform that supports customers’ lifestyle with the key  partners such as LINE Financial, Lu International, Central JD Fintech, Grab, and PTT.

She was keen on the analysis of customer behavior to provide hyper-personalised customer experience in the post-pandemic age. Last year, she introduced New Normal Customer Experience Management, a collaborative project designed to provide attentive in-house closed-loop experience management. It involves organization - wide units in KASIKORNBANK aimed at delivering excellent customer experience. By integrating knowledge management, data analytics and machine learning, communication channels for customers have been greatly enhanced.  After the launch, the number of the bank’s mobile app users grew by 19% year-on-year with high activity rate of 75%. Both transaction volume and value saw a double-digit growth.

The bank also introduced on its mobile app K Plus,  an enhancement where customers can apply for loans without the need to physically visit a branch. With her guidance, K PLUS continued to develop and improve in three key strategic areas such as: open banking platform, credit card product, and digital experience for payment and services. The mobile app recorded 17.1 million users and facilitated more than 95% of retail payment transactions.

She likewise led the expansion of the retail banking customer base by empowering customers’ lives and businesses in key growth areas such as: payment, lending, savings, and investment. She deepened customer engagement by offering solutions tailored to each segment’s needs and lifestyles. The bank saw significant growth in its mass affluent customer segment, middle income segment, and high-valued segment. 

She also had an initiative in the financial inclusion of persons with disabilities. Under her leadership, the bank introduced  K Plus Beacon, a mobile banking app  for visually-impaired customers. It allowed people with zero or low visual acuity, such as the elderly, to conduct transactions online without viewing the screen. Private, convenient, fast and safe, the app enables balance inquiries, transfers, service top-ups and bill payments.

For demonstrating phenomenal leadership over the year, The Retail Finance Person of the Year is awarded to Supaneewan Chutrakul, executive vice president of KASIKORNBANK.