B2BiQ

On succeeding and failing quickly, Martin Rouen, "I think it's all the intelligence and experience that you gather over time, often by sometimes making the wrong direction and making some mistakes, learning from them and doing things differently. Or sometimes doing the right thing, and actually it's been reinforced by the results that you get. I think it's a range of things but it's all that really. I think if you think about collateral, it could be our training collateral that we've got so we're self-sufficient in terms of what we do. It can be all our standard operating procedures that actually give instructions of how we do stuff. But it's more than that, it's everything, it's the experience, it's everything. It's all-encompassing."

Angela Hunter joins us and shares that "being more customer centric means you need to be able to map customer journeys, being more customer centric means you need to implement new measurement systems and not just focus on an annual survey, being more customer centric means that you need to understand how you can implement segmentation and lifecycle management and we didn't have anyone in the company that had those skills. So identifying that, that is a skill and that you need people that are experienced to do it, some of it we brought in short term consultants who had specific expertise, whilst we recruited, and we specifically went and found people, who had done it before in other industries not life insurance. The point there is, accelerating the quick wins, so I didn't wait six months until I had my full team on board to be able to get some quick wins."

From UBS Wealth Management, Ketan Samani joins us and shares his thoughts on digitalization, "There are two things, I think when I look at digitalization and the ecosystem that is developing, from a consumers prospective, they're looking that do organization I work with, or I need the services care for me? Do they have ethos of investing in relationship with me? The wealth management business like UBS is all around relationship. You can have very large client with few billion dollars and they act like corporation. They have lawyers, they have accountants, and they want that personalized touch. To the point at which somebody who just wants to give us one or two million dollars to invest and they also looking for personal touch. So the spectrum of sophistication of our clients are many. So in that, one of our biggest challenges. How do I build a team of people that helps to build a value chain? Not silos. To focus on client experience from both digital and non-digital. So when there is non-digital, it's all around cultural transformation of staff. In pushing the boundaries with systemically in order to derive at focus on client needs. Digitally, it's much more data driven. Round we look at behavior, data analytics, to see how we can correlate between offline and online client experience consistency. As a private bank, clients are paying us a lot of money to get that client experience. And UBS, being the world's previous premier bank, has to demonstrate that. And if you look at our marketing events and our client education events, we stretch our goals. Not only to serve the client who's paying us fees, but their children, the next generation, who may inherit this big responsibility to preserve the wealth of the family. To pass it on to the next generation. And we look to educate them on how they should do that."

Philip Woodburn joins us and starts off by providing an overview of the structure of the team: "Four or five years ago we started moving the basic transactional finance, payment of vendors, cash application for customers, down to Monterey but we kept what called the competency centerpiece all around financial reporting and  financial closing. We've kept that team. It's not a big team, about 30 people. So it's a small portion of what we do globally, but very close to our business leaders up in North America so that we can keep the engagement with the business. We are a French group, but US actually is our biggest country globally. The Philippines was a base for us actually, both for manufacturing as well as services over the last eight years. Actually it's a very large call center particularly for our US market because Filipinos speak a lot of English. We built on that and we expanded that as a finance hub for the Eastern part of Asia and for the Pacific to give a little bit of proximity to the customers in that region. We're now starting to see a little bit more synergy between what we do in the Philippines and India on an Asia-Pacific basis, and we're clubbing together more of those operations in that particular geography today. But that's also, as you imagine, a long way away from Europe on the East side of the world. Malaysia is more of a hub for HR for Southeast Asia. But China definitely is an important base for us. China is our second largest country globally. We have a very large operation both in terms of industry, in terms of what we produce, as well as what we sell to the Chinese market and it's probably our fastest growing global market today, and we have a big team in China for Chinese speaking part of the world."

DBS Bank’s Managing Director, Head of Customer Experience Raju Nair joins us and shares that everything changed with the new CEO. "When he stated our new aspiration then was to become the bank of choice, initially. And he then said, 'Okay, we are the bank of choice for Asia, so we need to stand for Asian service. What is Asian service?' And the fact that even at that point of time, he spent almost four to five months, defining what is Asian service and he gave us that time. And then at the end of talking to all our customers and employees across the six markets, we came up with 96 different themes of what is Asian service. And then, him along with the top 50 of the banks, sat in a room and heard those 96 themes immersed in all the things that customers and employees told and then distilled it down to six. And we further distilling it down to three, which became our respectful, easy to deal with, and dependable, which is RED for Asian service.

BT’s Head of HR CEE & Russia, Maria Grocz joins us and shares the history of the shared services center in Hungary. "10 years ago we started with a finance shared service center. It was a top down decision to set up a center in Hungary. We started in Budapest because this is the capital. It's relatively easy to find people. But due to the other reason we wanted to have a second office in Hungary in a countryside. Just to have two locations in Hungary to find candidates from other countries as well like Romania, Ukraine, because we're close to the border. First we had to prove that the Hungarian employees are not only talented but good ones as well. They can perform and they can serve the customers as well as any other countries. So when we proved that then other business units moved to Hungary. Now we have about 20 different business units in the shared service center."