Digital Disruption - Martin Runow

Martin Runow:

There's a lot of buzzwords flying around in digital at the moment. So, AI, internet of things, cloud computing, blockchain, distributed letter technology, and it does mean a bit of all of that.  That does have to do with digital banking. But if I look at it a bit more broadly for corporate banking, what we would like to do is really take a look at how clients experience working with us across the whole range of products and services that we have out there with them, and really look at how to digitally enable that experience.  Then, that's broadly what we're looking at.

There's actually a lot going on, you know, in our corporate clients, businesses, industries, areas.  Both of us, in the sense of what's happening to our treasurers in our treasury and finance functions within their companies, as well as what's happening to the companies themselves. They've been on their own digital journeys, and they're trying to react to things that are happening in the market.  It's a lot of change in the transaction banking markets, payments markets.

For example, real-time payments going, you know, really global right now in Europe, across the U.S. We've had fossil payments here for a while, of course. There's open banking regimes that are starting to come and argue, be a bit more consumer focused. But still, there's a swap over effect into corporate, so the demand for corporate treasurers and people in finance is increasing. Right. They're expected to be on top of these things, to have all the information, balances, and others available at their fingertip in real-time, have a real view and understanding of technology and how that gets deployed within their companies. It's quite an exciting and fascinating time for them. At the same time, it's actually a lot more demand for them to be really on top of their digital journeys.

What it means for us, I believe, is that we do need to look at product development really through our client's eyes. Meaning we need to bring clients in as we develop out our services and our products in a digitally enabled world, and really take into account, also, how clients want things to work, how we expect things to work. And the example I want to give is, look at us as consumers of, you know, digital services everywhere in the world around us. Right?

I expect to look at my phone's camera and it will unlock, right? Expect that certain things will just work, that's the experience that we have at home in our private lives. And then, we expect our corporate treasurers to log into some tool to look at something that looks not quite like the modern journey we're used to. That's not acceptable, it's not going to be okay.  Right?  We have to adapt to these realities, and we are definitely on the way of getting there to make sure that we digitize these things and give clients a really complete, actually, digital experience.

Now, what that doesn't mean is that we're not going to be a personal bank anymore. Right? We love the personal relationship. We need it. All right. It just does mean that for the things the client - clients don't want to talk to a person. Just get stuff done. We, also, have to give them that experience.