Success Story: Interbank’s Digital Transformation

Published by Fintech Americas on Sep 11, 2020

Alex Bayly, Digital Transformation Manager at Interbank, shares this financial institution’s success story and the cultural shift required to drive transformation through a more agile approach to solution development alongside technology partner Liferay.

Improving customer experience has become a priority for banks in recent years, as they increasingly need to respond to the expectations and speed demanded by digitally connected customers.

Alex Bayly, Digital Transformation Manager at Interbank, explains the institution’s success story and the cultural transformation involved in adopting a more agile approach to solution development together with technology partner Liferay.

Interbank in numbers

The institution, which serves around 3 million customers, operates 168 branches/stores and 1,600 ATMs. It began its transformation by improving the physical experience: eliminating queues and offering coffee to customers while they waited to be attended.

“We transformed the physical experience together with our customers. We created a very strong relationship with them. Representatives knew customers’ families and their stories. But like any company, we knew we also needed to focus on the digital environment,” says Bayly.

However, the transition toward digital was not easy. The company had to reorganize itself internally. Initially, the technology area was divided into five different departments:

• Technology Applications, responsible for all development
• Technology Operations, responsible for infrastructure
• A Certification team for banking applications
• Functional Specifications
• Demand Management, responsible for handling business priorities

“The structure we had — in a waterfall format — took too long to deliver solutions, meaning it did not meet customer needs. We needed a cultural shift to generate continuous value delivery,” Bayly explains.

Later, Interbank created the Digital Products/Services and Digital Channels areas, responsible for bridging traditional channels with new customer service channels.

They also adopted Scrum methodologies within these teams, redesigned workspaces with more open environments, meeting rooms, and even gaming areas to encourage collaboration and innovation.

“Even then, it still wasn’t enough to make us more agile. We remained dependent on integration team prioritization and development backlogs…”

As a result, Interbank implemented a new structure with nine crews responsible for end-to-end project development.

Results achieved in digital channels

Today, Interbank’s digital channels include an app with nearly 1 million active users, growing between 10% and 12% month over month and handling around 15,000 financial transactions per hour.

“Within our app, customers can complete 94% of the operations traditionally carried out in branches or call centers,” says Bayly.

Through online banking, customers can configure their experience, manage transfer limits, and handle additional cards.

With the Beneficios app, customers receive benefits, offers, and promotions.

Additionally, the Interbank website was redesigned to provide a more personalized experience and now receives more than 3 million unique visits per month.

Selling, educating, and informing customers

Working together with partner Liferay and the Interbank team, the company transformed its primary digital channel from HTML into Liferay DXP.

“It’s not just a content website anymore — it’s a transactional platform where we sell products and services.”

Interbank’s digital platform strategy focused on the following objectives:

1. Sell: enable 100% digital sales

A dedicated section was created where customers receive product offers based on the services and products they already have with the bank.

“To achieve this, we transformed a traditional process into a digital one. Previously, a customer who wanted to open a business account, called Cuenta Negocio, had to visit two different institutions and wait between three and five days for activation. Today, through process automation, customers fill out a form on our website and their account is available within a single day.”

2. Inform: improve customer self-service

Phone banking used to receive between 20,000 and 25,000 calls per day — complaints, suggestions, stolen card blocking, and credit card activation requests.

Nearly 7,000 of those calls were solely related to credit card activation, with each operation taking approximately eight minutes.

Now, the same process on the digital platform takes only 40 seconds.

3. Educate and personalize

The promotions website receives around 90,000 visits per month.

“When customers log in using their identification, we analyze their credit/debit card usage and other information to recommend promotions that best match their spending habits,” Bayly explains.

To achieve this, they used data analytics to improve real-time decision-making.

Today, the company is preparing for new ways to meet customer expectations by investing in DevOps culture, scaled agility models, and cloud migration for certain types of transactions.

Additionally, they have already begun implementing advanced facial biometrics to simplify sales processes and are moving toward enabling 24/7 sales operations.