Migrant Remittances Case Study - Malaysia

 Valyou is the fastest growing mobile wallet provider in Malaysia, with a merchant network that’s over 2,000 strong and growing. Their customers use the service to send international remittances, pay their bills, and top up their mobile phones in Malaysia and overseas, all from an award-winning app on their mobile device. However, Valyou needed a way to better serve the as yet untapped Migrant Remittances market.

The Challenge

This 1.7 million migrant population urgently needed a way to send money without the inconvenience of brick-and mortar location constrained Banks or the insecurity of fly-by-night providers, but a mobile-only solution wasn’t altogether a natural fit. The inherent challenge that Valyou faced was maneuvering complicated integrations with banks and payout partners who had complex currencies and platforms.

In spite of its strong and growing merchant network, Valyou nevertheless had a steep hill to climb. The migrant community was an insular one whose buying behavior was heavily influenced by word-of-mouth. They would need a way to build and sustain trust, one customer at a time and at the same time break into a very tech-wary market.

In the Malaysian migrant consumer economy, where competition for market-share is won and lost based on peer-to peer recommendations, Valyou could not afford failure of any kind. The technology had to be stable, because even a minute of downtime could shred their reputation. It had to be designed for inexperienced users, because its target customer was not especially tech-savvy. Most of all, it simply had to work.

The Input

Which is why Valyou simply had to partner with Telepin, whose relationship with Valyou’s parent company, Telenor, had cemented their reputation as a strategic partner. First, Valyou needed a way to escort users through their initial interactions with the technology. They created a trusted “concierge” network that’s now over 2,000 merchants strong. Valyou’s technology itself is designed as an extension of this concierge experience. With Telepin helping on the backend, Valyou gave agents the means to build a standard transaction on behalf of a user and save it inside that user’s mobile wallet.

Valyou was able to create borderless pathways of stored value quickly and smoothly thanks, in large part, to Telepin’s expertise. Financials blockchain technology, introduced earlier in the year was also integral to connecting the Valyou to Easypaisa wallets.

The Output

The result was a complete end-to-end system, including a secure and robust platform with open application programming interfaces and customer focused apps and a wallet-to-wallet transfer service that connects to the APIs of providers operating in countries where most migrants send their money. This meant providing users with meaningful experiences and tools. For example, the app instantly delivers a confirmation receipt when a user sends money, reassuring them in the moment that their transfer has gone through.

This wallet-to-wallet service began with a partnership linking Valyou to Easypaisa, a Telenor entity and the largest e-wallet in Pakistan. Next came Bangladeshis, who are the second largest migrant community in Malaysia sending money home every month.

This wallet-to-wallet service began with a partnership linking Valyou to Easypaisa, a Telenor entity and the largest e-wallet in Pakistan. Next came Bangladeshis, who are the second largest migrant community in Malaysia sending money home every month.

The Outcome

As a result, Valyou has seen its customer base grow by 66% within the first year of its launch (2016), which Valyou attributes to its customer focused design backed by Valyou’s strong network of agents and ambassadors. The mobile wallet, according to Valyou, is exceeding its customers’ expectations, giving them what they’ve long needed. Valyou’s mobile wallet technology, now entering its third year of operation, has never had a moment of downtime.

Source: Telepin

Today, over 70% of surveyed millennials say they would be happy to pay for banking products and services provided by non-banking companies—for example, telecommunications operators, technology and internet providers, online retailers. And of course customers will increasingly want their bank to offer content carrying higher value-added—products and services that fit their needs more closely.

Some banks are responding by trying to extract value from banking transaction data itself by providing customers with APIs to access their data, or directly supplying the tools for any business to manage its financial transactions on its own or for a bank to develop its digital offering (Bancbox, Open Bank Project, Plaid, etc.).

Banks that will successfully achieve transformation will need to leverage their knowledge of their customers to remain as the main point of contact, offering a wider and better range of services, whether sourced internally or through platforms where various specialist providers and customers themselves can interact.

The Transformation Of BBVA

BBVA, a middle size, mostly retail, bank in Spain, soon became aware of the depth and reach of the change faced by the banking industry when many banks in Europe, still thought their field would be perpetually shielded by regulations and user conservatism.

New technologies (e-learning platform, use of mobile devices) and new learning approaches (newsletters, on-the-job learning, MOOCs) were becoming an increasingly important way of providing a range of flexible training options that everyone could access. BBV embarked upon a goal to create a new work experience for the digital era.

They regarded the new corporate buildings then under construction to be a powerful instrument to accelerate change in their organization and set in motion a highly ambitious Big Data project. BBVA started launching new products designed and produced specially for the digital world, such as BBVA Wallet. BBVA Ventures helps the bank to stay on top of what is happening in the realm of digital banking. But the pace of change in the digital realm and the ongoing acceleration of the innovation cycle all around, further prompted them to speed up their transformation and turn around their organizational structure in radical ways to place the digital world at the center of their vision for the future. BBVA Digital Banking was established as a new Business Area.

BBVA Digital Banking: A Radical Organizational Change to Accelerate Transformation

The main purpose of BBVA Digital Banking was to speed up the Group’s transformation into a digital bank. The Area was directly responsible for developing existing distribution channels, adapting internal processes and designing a new range of digital products and services capable of delivering the best possible customer experience. The guiding idea was that the Area will, in addition to enhancing BBVA’s digital business and presence, work as a catalyst to transform the entire Group. The new Digital Banking Area’s mission has four key angles: a new, enhanced customer experience; knowledge-driven personalization using the best data analysis technologies; communication in clear, concise language; and access to products and services at any time and from any place. This new project management model entailed a new human resource management model.

BBVA Digital Banking brought together all digital ventures and initiatives throughout the Group and drove forward an ambitious project for change, which had two branches: transformation in project management and in human resource management This organizational structure reflected the Digital Banking Area’s goal of transforming BBVA’s existing activity and finding new, knowledge-driven lines of business in the digital realm.

So in the more developed markets, such as Spain and the United States, the Digital Banking Area’s scope of action extended to digital transformation of the entire franchise and the development of new business models and value proposals beyond the scope of conventional banking. Thus clearly, the creation of BBVA Digital Banking was a bold and insightful decision in aid of speeding up the Group’s digital transformation.

The Main Take Away: CHANGE REQUIRES LEADERSHIP

It was some time ago that BBVA perceived the risks and opportunities inherent in technological change, and for several years they had worked towards reinventing themselves and moving on from analog banking—however efficient and profitable it might have been by the standards of the twentieth century—into a knowledge-driven digital business of the twenty-first century. First, the construction over the past seven years of an entirely new technology platform capable of supporting the data capture, storage and processing requirements of digital banking, which were far more demanding than those seen in conventional banking. More recently, the launch of the Digital Banking Area had marked a turning-point in the transformation of their processes, structures, approaches to work, capabilities and mindset, in alignment with the demands of the digital world.

BBVA now sees itself in a position to lead the process of transformation of the banking industry and so become the first—and best—knowledge-based bank, fully in alignment with the digital ecosystem. BBVA also realizes that this is the kind of leadership they will need in future if they are to achieve their goal that BBVA should become the foremost figure in transforming the best of analog banking into the best of knowledge-based banking for the twenty-first century.

Source: BBVA

BMO, Bank of Montreal. is the fourth largest bank in Canada and serves more than 12 million personal, commercial, corporate, and institutional customers in North America and internationally. BMO recognizes that offering its customers a satisfying digital onboarding experience is essential to retaining and growing its customer base.

The Opportunity

To focus on efficiency through technology innovation, process enhancement, and increased digitalization across channels, BMO implemented an enterprise-wide shared services platform in order to provide its customers and employees a simplified and responsive digital user experience.

In addition to user experience, assigning a piece of paper the value of 0.08 cents (based on cost for printing, scanning, transferring, storing, and destroying paper), once all products had been converted to eForms, the reduction of paper in its retail branches would save the bank CAN$132 million ($98.2 million) a year.

It was important to BMO that the modular build of the eForms and eSignature capabilities renders them highly reusable across the organization, allowing BMO to be more innovative in the way it offers the solution. The modular design of the platform enabled lines of business to follow the same workflow and to have access to the eForms and eSignature platform, regardless of the channel used by the customer or product chosen. The consistency of processes and user experience enables faster and smarter deployment of BMO’s digital capabilities and has led to notable improvements in the compliance and audit processes.

But, BMO did not go it alone. BMO partnered with Quadient and eSignLive by VASCO to design a universal enterprise platform that offers standardized eForms and eSignature and plug-and-play microservices capabilities. BMO deployed Inspire Interactive, a thin client, self-service customer communications portal, and Inspire Designer, to create elegant, standardized eForm designs that are rationalized, dynamic in nature, auto-populating, and QR-coded to simplify how BMO ingests documents.

Implementation

Agile project teams were established, with representation across the bank, including staff from business, process, product, legal, compliance, and technology groups. Partnering with Quadient enabled BMO to create dynamic form templates, rationalize content, simplify scanning capabilities, and, where appropriate, reuse content across other documents.

BMO is now in the process of expanding the deployment of its eForms and eSignature capabilities across other core businesses, including commercial banking, wealth management, and capital markets, as well as internal functions.

Results

BMO has more than delivered on its objectives. With the deployment of its platform across its 940 Canadian retail branches, the initiative is saving its 2,000 strong salesforce between 15 and 30 minutes a day on processing forms. Since its launch in October 2016, BMO’s eForms engine has generated approximately 1.4 million digital documents, equating to 2.2 million sheets of paper. In addition, efficiency ratios on the frontline have increased by 40% overall, with an impressive 80% efficiency ratio across the audit process.

Also one of the most substantive benefits of this initiative has been the automation and streamlining of the audit processes. This is critical if banks are to overcome the daily challenges of governance, increased information requests, and compliance requirements. It also goes a way to solving the struggle to resource audit and compliance functions and will reduce the heavy manual burden on audit and compliance professionals.

Lessons Learned

For a 200-year-old bank, one of the biggest challenges BMO faced was getting employees to adapt to the concepts of the Agile methodology and agile working habits. With legacy systems built over all those years and with a penchant for paper, it was important to communicate “the what, the why, and the how” of the Agile approach: The why being the benefits of an end-to-end digital onboarding process.

To accomplish this, the team put in place an education program that shows the benefits of digital transformation and the value of reusable components and tools that can quickly generate reoccurring savings.

Source: Quadient

Experian® is the world's leading global credit information services company. Experian has more than 16,000 people operating across 37 countries and every day it is investing in new technologies, talented people and innovation to help all clients maximize every opportunity.

From credit reporting to data services

On the list of great business challenges, one of the most daunting today may be this: Transforming an established enterprise built on legacy software into a fast-moving, agile organization ready to take on the digital world. The company morphed into being more of a strategic partner with the customer, helping to decide what type of product should be built, to better understand how customers want to access information. That shift—from providing standardized credit reporting, to integrating real-time data into a line of customer-driven services—encapsulates the transformation strategy that Experian is implementing today.

The vision: A single identity platform

When the current management team came on board, Experian had many different identity management systems—including products from Okta, Ping, RSA, Oracle, and MobileIron—implemented across various parts of the company. In shepherding Experian through the transformation process, the team’s first priority was to give developers across the company one set of tools, so they could build products in a consistent standardized way. Standardizing on one identity and authentication platform would thus be critical for unifying the company’s architecture internally and externally. For that single identity platform, the team wanted a cloud-based identity solution.

In April 2015, two months before the present management team came on board, Experian’s Consumer Services division had launched its Credit Tracker app, allowing individual consumers to keep track of and manage their credit in an unprecedented way. Global infrastructure and technology operations, which was responsible then, chose Okta because of the way it allowed Experian to bring usability and security together, to build a world-class mobile app.

Implementation

The next step was deploying Okta to Experian’s 16,000 employees and connecting all their applications to it: financial systems, email, human resources systems, marketing platforms, and so forth. Experian also offers marketing services, fraud detection, and credit services to financial institutions, such as American Express, Barclay’s, Citibank, and Chase, so it was critical to authenticate that everybody who’s pulling information were who they say they were. For a such a large enterprise, the single authentication implementation had gone remarkably fast, effectively consolidating all internal and external Experian applications onto the Okta platform within one year.

On the consumer interface they used to provide a prescriptive way that they wanted to interact with customers. But the customers were saying, that they loved the information and services being provided, but needed to consume them differently. To meet those demands, Experian had to start building out an API services environment that would allow customers to programmatically interface with Experian data sources and pull the exact information they needed, thereby giving the consumer more control.

Outcomes

While Experian was not particularly unique in its quest for digital transformation, but getting the API micro-services economy right was extremely important. That’s why they needed to bolster platform by providing an API call that uses Apigee and Okta: Okta to make sure we’ve got the security right, and Apigee to make sure the right API call was being executed. The user experience is so much enriched by an API economy, that it will help Experian enter new markets, integrate business units, and expand its business.

Source: OCTA Inc.