^{Business Review} Group Business Services

Group Business Services played a central role in 2021 in implementing the Bank’s strategy for growth and enhanced operational efficiency. Spurred on by an increasingly competitive banking landscape, we provided cross-functional support across the organisation, delivering operational excellence and driving the technological advances that are fuelling expansion of the Bank’s businesses. GBS has also been instrumental in ADCB’s successful response to the global pandemic, with rapid digital progress supporting operational continuity and a superior customer experience.

Our efficiency drive is being facilitated by acceleration of digital transformation and automation, which has enhanced customer service and streamlined internal processes. The strong pace of digital releases has been maintained, with 31 customer releases delivered in 2021, bringing the total to 93 releases since inception of the transformation programme.

Meanwhile, our teams worked hard to reduce average time to market by approximately a third. Over 100 technology-related projects were delivered in 2021, with another 80 underway at the end of the year, designed to optimise internal processes, push the boundaries of customer experience, and contribute to new revenue-generating opportunities.

The projects are carefully calibrated to maximise contribution to the Bank’s five-year strategy. Furthermore, in line with ADCB’s customer-centric approach, we ensure that customer testing and feedback loops are incorporated into our projects, providing invaluable information to deliver market success.

We prioritised digital initiatives that produced the largest impact on the customer experience, helping to drive progressive improvement in our net promoter score for digital during 2021 to reach 65 in December.

Our areas of focus included improving our digital servicing capabilities, automating back-office and contact centre tasks, as well as leveraging emerging technologies, such as Artificial Intelligence and cloud computing.

Major digital initiatives delivered in 2021

• Launch of WhatsApp banking
• Developer portal and Application Processing Interface (API) marketplace
• Cloud environment for KYC blockchain
• Virtual accounts API for additional customers
• Series of ProCash mobile & ProTrade enhancements
• Advanced analytics use cases in personal loan pricing and collections
• Mobile Banking enhancements on privacy, payments and personal loan journeys
• uBank (ADCB’s digital branch) introduced as delivery channel for Hayyak onboarding app
• Enhancement of ADCB.com with addition of tailor-made offers
• Beneficiary management on ProCash mobile
• Self-service capabilities enhancements for WBG customers
• Account statement and payment notification APIs released for WBG customers
• Launch of FlexiPay on Internet Banking
• New UX/UI launched for Mobile Banking
• Leveraged advanced analytics to strengthen anti-money laundering processes

The online IPO subscription portal, delivered in only one month from conceptualisation to launch, highlighted the team’s exemplary project delivery capabilities. The initiative transformed ADCB into one of the leading receiving banks for capital market offerings, such as the Yahsat and ADNOC Drilling IPOs, helping to drive additional fee income.

The GBS team was also central to the seamless integration of the retail and SME mortgage portfolios acquired from Abu Dhabi Finance. Leveraging our learnings from the merger in 2019, we worked to tight deadlines to facilitate the transfer of approximately 1,000 mortgages to the ADCB banking platform with zero disruption to customer service. This was key to the Bank’s ability to introduce a wider range of products and services to the migrated customers.

We also introduced a number of new features on the Bank’s digital platforms and channels to improve the user experience for Consumer and Wholesale Banking customers. These enhancements included the introduction of WhatsApp banking, complementing the growing role of our social media platforms in providing real-time information.

The GBS team drove further efficiencies in back-office functions through additional digital self-service functionality and greater automation, including in the areas of cheque reconciliation, customer experience management and payments enquiries.

In a year of intense activity, the net promoter score for GBS was 69.

ADCB is ensuring that the acceleration of digital transformation reinforces the Bank’s core value of Care—meaning that we always put the customer first, consider the wider community and honour our commitments.

The deployment of advanced analytics and artificial intelligence will transform banking to make it more personalised and secure, and Group Business Services is spearheading the Bank’s rapid progress in this area. During 2021, we improved capabilities and usage, implementing a Big Data Archival Solution as well as first use case of both real-time analytics and artificial intelligence.

Advanced analytics will enable us to connect our customers, providing the most appropriate products and services in a timely manner. In 2021, we increased the personalisation of notifications from Mobile and Internet Banking, and enhanced self-service channels.

In parallel, we believe that AI will be a powerful force in detecting and preventing fraud since it can quickly identify and highlight patterns in consumer behaviour and transactional data that appear suspicious. We are currently investing in this technology, which will not only improve efficacy but also reduce long-term costs associated with fraud prevention.

The Bank is also working towards creating new ecosystems in partnership with diverse third-party businesses to provide an extensive range of products and services. Such initiatives will open up ADCB products and services to a wider audience, creating new revenue streams. We took a significant step towards this new business model, by making significant progress towards the launch of a new ‘developer portal’ to offer our market-facing APIs (application programming interfaces) to external parties. The initiative provides developers with a digital marketplace where they can choose from our suite of API products to support their business. The portal provides access to the technical specifications and software, allowing partners to trial the technology in a secure test environment.

Listening carefully is at the centre to our approach to customer centricity, and this process is driven by the ADCB service framework. Each year, we reach out to over 200,000 customers for feedback, which informs a portfolio of service improvement initiatives. Action is driven by a customer experience forum, chaired by the Group CEO, while customer experience features in every employee’s KPIs and scorecard.

The Bank continues to invest in customer research and developing channels of engagement, particularly in light of changes in customer behaviour, partly driven by the experience of the global pandemic. As a result, ADCB’s social media channels have rapidly gained traction and are now playing a key role in customer engagement, complementing our traditional channels such as the contact centre, Excellency Centres and branches.

The Bank’s Twitter account has over 40,000 followers, while its Facebook page has nearly 400,000 fans, LinkedIn has nearly 300,000 followers, Instagram has nearly 22,000 followers and the YouTube channel has nearly 17,000 subscribers. Our in-house team communicates rapidly and authentically through these channels to ensure regular and accurate flow of information, and to address enquiries from customers and potential customers.

We have also worked to ensure that the employee composition at our branches and contact centre accurately reflects the diversity of our customer base, while offering multi-lingual support, including in Urdu and Hindi as well as in Arabic and English.