First National Bank (FNB) has enjoyed much success lately, being rated best bank in South Africa and the most innovative in the world.
FNB won the world title at the Financial Global Banking Awards in Washington DC, USA. A neutral third-party board called the “Innovation Circle Judging Panel” selected the award winners.
The South African Customer Satisfaction Index (SAcsi) yesterday revealed FNB as the bank with the most satisfied customers following research conducted with 6,582 respondents.
In South Africa FNB is considered to be the leading bank with regards to online banking services, according to the All Media Products Survey (AMPS) results, which were released in June last year. FNB Online reportedly dominates the market share of electronic banking consumers.
Farren Roper, head of FNB Connect ISP and Business Operations, spoke to HumanIPO about their success.
“Innovation is part of the FNB culture. It is also not a top down approach, but a bottom up. Having flexible teams, an owner manager culture and encouraging big innovations as well and ‘mini-vations’ from all staff reinforces this culture throughout the organisation,” said Roper.
Roper added: “Financial services and ICT are becoming increasingly converged and the global trends are towards social and mobile. So many technology innovations have been geared towards us becoming a social and lifestyle organisation as well as an organisation that does mobile really well.”
A poll by BusinessTech asked “which bank is the best in South Africa?”. Most of the voters opted for FNB, who is (at the time of writing) leading the poll with 57 per cent with Capitec following far behind with 19 per cent.
HumanIPO asked Roper if this is an indication that FNB is leading in terms of client numbers.
Roper responded: “Customer acquisition is increasingly on the rise, but we do not want to fall prey to the sins of complacency. Innovation at FNB is a continuous process. We are always trying to strive for more than our achievements of the past. The customers’ needs is always at the centre of what we do. In particular when it comes to innovation.
“As the largest financial services brand on social media we use that as a means not only to interact with our customers, but to gather ideas for future innovations, to see where we are delivering good service and also where the improvement areas are. A lot of our technology development, for example [the] Banking-App mini-vations stems from customer demand,” said Roper.
FNB’s popular advertising campaign commonly known as the “beep bank” with “Steve” adverts saw more people being attracted to the bank.
“Steve had a relatable element to him. He spoke to many pressure points when it came to customer needs in banking, but also highlighted some of our many unique value propositions, ending off on a very powerful and thought provoking rhetorical question – ‘can your bank do that?’” Roper said.
He said the catalyst for the successes of winning the title of the world’s most innovative bank as well as being rated the best overall online application in South Africa and receiving an award for overall excellence in technology at the technology top 100 awards, are attributed to “powerful teams and the intellectual capital of our staff who are always striving to make our customers lives that much better”.
Innovations by FNB include the banking application; a first in Africa, the e-wallet, which is accessed through the banking app for non FNB customers, digital banking through the Asus Google Nexus 7 3G and Wi-Fi tablet, online banking platform through their website, mobile phone banking, free ADSL data for qualifying FNB cheque holders, interactive customer care through Twitter @RBjacobs, first with Geo Payments (person-to-person contactless payment system) and VoIP expertise.
Lastly, FNB is the only bank in the country with its own Internet Service Provider (ISP) and is also the first bank to have offered a discounted rate and interest free smartphone and tablet deal.
