Although the past year has seen significant disruption to markets, businesses and communities, the Consumer Banking Group has remained focused on its objectives and strategic goals, delivering strong performance throughout the crisis.

Our customer base grew by approximately 17% in 2020. Meanwhile, our current and savings account (CASA) deposits increased by AED 15 billion during the year. This growth was achieved through our segment-based relationship model, data-driven lifecycle management and an embedded culture of service excellence.

The success of the Consumer Banking Group is reflected in a sustained increase in customer satisfaction, with our NPS score¹ reaching 69% in 2020, 23 points above our 2014 baseline.

In responding to the COVID-19 pandemic, the Group sought to immediately provide a secure operational framework from which our employees could service customers, whilst guaranteeing uninterrupted service provision. Our highly evolved digital channels became a primary focus, with the ADCB mobile banking platform seeing a particularly strong rise in uptake among our customers.

A new remote working process was implemented for our relationship managers and sales teams, using email scanning and call recording to facilitate customer servicing and product fulfilment.

To ease the burden on our customers, and in harmony with the approach of the UAE leadership and the UAE Central Bank’s Targeted Economic Support Scheme, ADCB offered loan deferments and waivers on interest charges for customers directly impacted by COVID-19, a 50% reduction in late payment charges on credit cards; a 5% increase in LTV ratio for first-time homebuyers; and interest-free instalment plans for school fee payments and service charge waivers.

We also provided full refunds of foreign currency processing fees for travel cancellations and charges for cash withdrawals with debit cards used at any ATM in the UAE.

Given the difficult prevailing economic circumstances, the Bank did not issue negative credit bureau reporting for clients who previously had a clean credit history. Meanwhile, we ensured that customers benefitting from deferrals maintained their credit profile at previous levels.

1 In line with our digital transformation strategy and the impact of COVID-19, NPS methodology was changed to digital channels in H2’20, therefore reported NPS scores are for Q1’20 only.

SUCCESSFUL INTEGRATION

ADCB’s integration with Union National Bank (UNB) and Al Hilal Bank has resulted in significant cost efficiencies through productivity enhancements and economies of scale.

The complex integration was completed seamlessly in April 2020 despite most of our employees working from home due to COVID-19 safety measures. This final phase saw the transfer of former UNB customers to the ADCB banking platform, having full access to our rich value proposition and expanded digital capabilities.

As adoption of digital channels accelerated in 2020, the Bank reduced its branch network during the third quarter to pre-merger levels of 54 prime locations in the UAE, down from 73 branches in the second quarter and a peak of 127 following the merger with UNB in May 2019.

Greater efficiencies and a rigorous cost management programme have produced a significant reduction in direct costs, with total expenses borne by the Consumer Banking Group down to Q4 2018 run-rate levels.

We continue to adjust our operating model to account for changing customer demand and behaviour due to strong penetration of digital banking services.

DIGITAL TRANSFORMATION

Our digital vision is for a service that supports our customers’ everyday lives by offering simplicity, convenience and control of their banking.

ADCB’s Virtual Branch concept, launched in May to support our customers during the pandemic, provided access to a range of banking services without the need for human interaction. This was designed primarily to serve Excellency and Privilege clients and offers service request facilities for fixed deposit redemption, standing order instruction management, fund transfer requests, overdraft-related requests and partial loan settlement.

This innovation has reduced the turn-around-time (TAT) on service requests from 48 hours to 12 hours and has proved to be a convenient banking solution for our customers. The concept proved highly popular, with 91% of clients and 96% of staff surveyed recommending the virtual model.

Our ongoing digital transformation has also seen increased mobile banking penetration among our retail customers in 2020. Digital banking financial transactions rose by 28% year on year in 2020 to reach 15 million. Approximately 93% of all our transactions are now electronic, while all fund transfers and utility bill payments are also digital.

Our Hayyak onboarding app brought in over 117,000 new customers during the year. The number of customers subscribed to ADCB’s digital banking channels rose by 19% during 2020 to 827,000, representing 74% of total Consumer Banking customers.

The facilities offered by the Hayyak and mobile internet banking apps — for new-to-bank and existing customers, respectively — have expanded in 2020 and now include a paperless, instant personal loan application service, whereby funds are credited instantly.

Meanwhile, InstaPay, launched in November 2020, provides customers with instantaneous transfers to UAE accounts of up to AED 10,000 each month without the need to register a beneficiary. When using this service, funds are credited to the beneficiary account within minutes. Within 10 days of launching InstaPay, 2,500 transfers had been processed, totalling AED 3 million, immediately affirming its popularity.

ADCB’s eco-friendly, paperless, uBank digital banking centres, located in malls, offer a range of on-demand services for day-to-day banking, such as instant account opening, credit card issuance and credit or debit card replacement, all of which are available 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, eliminating the need to bank within usual working hours.

We are also now among only a small number of UAE banks offering the entire range of globally recognised mobile wallets. In addition to Apple Pay and Samsung Pay, we added Google Pay, and three ‘wearable’ wallets — Fitbit Pay, Garmin Pay and Swatch Pay to our lineup in 2020. Mobile wallet performance in 2020 was strong, with over 176,000 active digital cards and digital wallet transactions increased by 171%.

Our digital initiatives received industry recognition during the year. The ADCB TouchPoints rewards programme, which achieved an online redemption rate of 98% in 2020, received the Silver award in the Digital Transformation category of the Gulf Customer Experience Awards. Also, our Hayyak onboarding app was named ‘Best Digital Transformation Implementation’ by Asian Banker.

MERCHANT SERVICES

Our merchant services supported approximately 5,800 customers in 2020 by providing secure and flexible end-to-end payment solutions to facilitate businesses across the UAE. Today we enjoy a market share of 6%, despite having been established only four years ago. In 2020, 60 million transactions were completed using our 18,750 terminals across the emirates.

The past year has seen the launch of our new virtual point-of-sale (POS) app in collaboration with Visa — ADCB Pace Pay — which has so far onboarded around 250 customers. The first virtual (POS) app in the UAE, ADCB Pace Pay is designed to significantly simplify payment processing for micro-businesses and SMEs, particularly in the face of the disruption caused by the pandemic. The service offers comparatively lower service fees, an in-app interactive dashboard of all transactions and instant availability of funds in the merchant’s wallet with an immediate cash-out facility to merchants’ bank accounts.

For the second year running, we were recognised by the Visa Global Service Quality Awards, this time being named the ‘Highest Authorisation Approval Rate — Cross Border Consumer Point of Sale (POS) (Issuer)’ for the MENA region.