Belgium’s Argenta Bank has designed its digitization efforts to enhance customer experience:
Argenta Bank is Belgium’s fifth largest banking institution providing retail financial services for families in Belgium and the Netherlands. The parent group works through Argenta Spaarbank (banking) and Argenta Assuranties (insurance). The bank has over 1.7 million customers and its product offerings are built on 4 define pillars – savings, lending, insurance and investments. What is unique is that the bank operates through an extensive network of local self-employed tied agents.
Its aim is to be a strong and independent bank-insurer with an excellent customer service and lasting relationships with its shareholders, self-employed distribution partners, employees and suppliers.
AI FOR OPTIMAL MANPOWER
The Group has a strong technology infrastructure to ensure efficient service to its customers. For example, it had undertaken a project to optimize the use of manpower to service its customers faster, making use of AI. In the first instance, it implemented an intelligent mailroom using Belgian company Docbyte’s system. With the solution now fully implemented the bank has eliminated its backlog and reduced human errors while at the same time streamlined its team. Using smart algorithms, it is now able to serve customers efficiently and take up automation and digitization at a faster pace.
It is now able to automatically classify incoming mail, improving mailroom productivity and reducing human error and backlog. The automated mailroom ensured less manual intervention. Also, customers are now able to send documents through a variety of channels as all the communications flow through Docbyte’s software.
SOUND TECH PLATFORM
Argenta has a long-standing collaboration with Sopra Banking Software, a leader in technology services for financial institutions. With Sopra’s solutions at its core, the bank has been able to improve operations, deliver seamless digital experience to its customers and enrich customer engagement across various channels. Argenta mainly uses Sopra’s CBS. It has also incorporated Sopra’s Instant Payment software into the CBS platform on a subscription basis, thereby becoming one of the first banks to offer Instant Payments to its customers. It has also developed a unique Digital Banking Engagement Platform, an integrated banking system.
In the Netherlands, the bank has a major focus on mortgages and savings for individuals. It provides mortgages with favorable terms and the option to save, available through more than 3300 independent mortgage advisors. In order to make its services available to individual customers in an efficient manner, the bank collaborated with Emixa, a leader in digital transformation systems, to develop a flexible IT architecture for digital security. One of the first works to be completed is the renovated customer portal of the bank, ‘mijn Argenta’.
VALIDATION TOOL
The bank has put in place an efficient validation tool for its risk management to comply with regulations like ALM and IFRS 9. Based on the Yields MRM Suite, the solution automated repetitive tasks, maintained version control to tackle reproducibility issues, and assisted in monitoring efforts. Previously, the bank had limitations in conducting validations on a yearly basis but now it can perform validations monthly with little effort as the whole process in automated.
VARIED USE OF MOBILE APP
The bank’s ‘Argenta Bankieren’ mobile app helps its customers to track their balance and transactions, make money transfers, check their card transactions and look up other relevant information. The app has an animated registration screen for video and conversational functions. It is like a ‘bank in your pocket’, allowing instant money transfers, pay and receive via Payconiq, the mobile banking payment service, and Bancontact, another payment processing service, manage security settings and do secure banking with fingerprint, PIN code or facial recognition.
The app offers a conversational banking experience to the customers, which allows them to engage in a continuous conversation thread – like in WhatsApp. Customers can use it anytime from anywhere and trained bank staff will be available for answering queries. It is intentionally designed to be human-first. Customers can get assistance with payments or charges, receive advice on savings or investments, information about the latest products. The bank claims with this facility, the bank is not just ‘mobile first’ but ‘messaging first’ too.
Argenta today is a designated Significant Institution under the EU Banking Supervision. The bank has continuously adhered to a path, which it sums up as ‘Together, for customers, in all simplicity’. This is the commitment the bank’s management made while initiating an internal re-organization in 2023. For its customers, this commitment means they are more than ever the central focus, with a service delivery that stems from their specific needs. The bank has made 4 propositions for its customers in Belgium in this regard – Family and Protection, Living, Wealth and Business, and in the case of customers in the Netherlands, 2 – Living and Savings. It attends to these pledges through a network of offices in Belgium and intermediaries in the Netherlands. The bank is also committed to keeping daily banking through simple and accessible digital channels. It believes this is a formula it is implementing for customer satisfaction.
This article has been compiled based on publicly available information on the web, particularly the bank’s own website.
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