After the financial crisis of the last decade, it would be fair to say that banking has not always been regarded as one of the most loved professions by the masses. But the way the sector has taken steps to respond to the demands of the COVID crisis has changed, observes TSB Chief Operating Officer Suresh Viswanathan:
Much effort has been put into making sure that we do right by the customers. All of us have started feeling proud again about working for banks. It will take a little more time to establish itself permanently, but after 2008, it is a good place to start.
Like everyone else, TSB’s usual mode of operation changed in early 2020, as did the pandemic, he recalls:
The ability to physically meet or talk to someone in a capital contact center was de rigueur. In this way we did everything that we could not do on mobile phones. That yatra ended sometime in March last year. Like many other organizations, we were unprepared for the day when we all had to work from home to be completely productive for our clients. That’s just the reality.
But a crisis can bring unexpected positivity because it forces too much discipline and it takes away the ability, as Viswanathan says, to “advertisement away”. For TSB, an immediate priority was to get communication channels up and running with customers:
We didn’t have the ability for customers to chat with us electronically, there was no interactive banking. It took us five days to activate it for customers.
COVID and its death toll provided a compelling need to fix it as bereaved families try to reconcile their lost finances:
We went digital as soon as possible. We put digital forms for everything that customers usually need to come to a branch. All this was done by our soldiers. Not that highly trained software engineers were doing this. This was done by some of our regional forces to actually make these forms for our customers. So we were all in this together.
Given the fact that customers could not visit the branches, there were many more people who downloaded our mobile banking app and started using it. Of course now it has become a way of life. People have not gone back to physically visit us at the branches. We’ve all had to adjust our practices to really start working for customers faster and customers have joined us on that journey.
From the organizational point of view, COVID brought other changes, he added:
We do a lot of testing in the financial services industry. We prove to ourselves that if a building collapses, if a data center goes down, we can work with another. But we never tested, 4000 or 5000 people working from home every day.
It brought its own challenges, such as explicit information security questions as well as employees working from home with children screaming in the background. Customers were willing to give it some leeway, says Viswanathan, and the bank has learned a lot about how it works as an organization.
do the right thing
What hasn’t changed, Viswanathan suggests, is TSB’s mantra of providing wealth trust for all, something that may not have been more significant over the past 18 months. One result of this has been the firm’s ‘Do What Matters’ program:
The approach behind this is quite simple – if you take a look at who we are as an entity, who are the stakeholders that are impacted or affected by this, there are probably five ways to look at it. We see people. We look at businesses. We see coworkers. We look at the community. And then we look at the environment. We put these five things together in what we call our ‘what matters’ plan, just to make sure we remind ourselves of our responsibility to society and to actually measure progress. And set some aspirations against these five aspects.
Another frequently used phrase is Enterprise Assurance. Viswanathan compares it to the idea of having a flat tire and not knowing about it. You need someone to tell you there is a problem so that it can be resolved. If you know the brakes are good, you can accelerate with confidence. In technical terms, this translates into a need to be very data-driven, he says:
Most of us who have been close to technology know that the heart of running a platform is understanding your asset list. If you understand your property inventory and you manage it really well, everything else is like building the upper floors of a building on a good foundation. What we’re trying to do with the Enterprise Assurance function is not just the traditional stuff looking at risk and control and then from a process standpoint, but very data-driven.
service now
A major enabler here has been ServiceNow. TSB began by implementing IT service management, introduced by Viswanathan as a “crawl, walk, run” approach:
We started by implementing ServiceNow within the IT service management community to ensure that we have laid the foundation appropriately. We have now taken it to all our partners, so that they can report problems, incidents, incidents as they experience in their daily lives. He now comes back to us through ServiceNow.
The next step was to use Service Now from an internal audit standpoint to address the issues:
We will win or lose depending on how we protect our brand. There’s going to be a lot of that security because bad things can happen from an IT standpoint or bad actors are trying to beat us down the cyber route. So the way we build our fort and build a moat around the fort is going to be very important for us.
More functional capabilities are likely to follow, but Viswanathan places great emphasis on moving at a steady and fixed pace:
For us, what is very important is that we choose the tool and we stick with the choice over the tool. We build great relationships with our partners so that they understand the pain we go through and the opportunities we have and we can take full advantage of the tools… we are too crazy to say that these are the systems that But we’re going to bet, whether it’s surveillance or warnings or management or whatever.
It all comes back to the confidence of the customers in the bank, he added:
You want your customers to trust you and feel that you are reliable and that you are in their camp, not your camp. I think the brand already has an impact with the customers. Our job is to make sure we increase that trust… to us, the trust and convenience and ability to practically meet the many needs of our customers is probably what I’d love to see this company take in five years’ time. I hope the rest of the world goes on like this. You want to be successful by doing the right things. If that happens you will probably leave a better place for our future generations.
In the end, it all comes down to three things, he concluded – people, processes and systems:
If you are able to ensure that people are empowered enough to make decisions, you can keep the collective organization moving at speed. It’s not risk department vs customer department vs ops; It’s actually ‘Team TSB’. Then people feel very free. Everyone comes to the office, wanting to make a difference, either for the customers or for themselves. If we can create an environment where people aren’t intimidated and they’re playing a team sport, that’s great.
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