Adtech Sydney live blog: The financial CEOs
Welcome back to Adtech Sydney. The CEOs mentioned in the headline above are Roger Grobler of Real Insurance, Gerd Schenkel of UBank and Harry Wendt of Westpac. So expect finance fun.
2.04pm: here we go…
From Gerd: “For banks GFC was defining event of the decade. What the GFC has done is a catalyst to bring forward digital trends.”
Roger: “Now you’ve got spiders crawling around the internet crawling around getting the prices.” Which means that pricing is no longer a barrier to entry for new players. You can also easily see what consumers say about brands.
Harry: Second wave of digital is starting. Not just a distribution channel for banks.
Roger: “Need to not lock yourself into one technology.”
Gerd: “Not as easy as you think to do that, and if you take wrong path, takes you 2-3 years to get out of it. You need to do trial and error without betting the company.”
Q. Social media – how does an organisation which is culturally risk averse deal with uncontrollable brand conversations.
Gerd: UBank we can experiment with, without encroaching on (parent company) NAB’s space. That allowed us to have decent amount of freedom and experimenting in the social media space. Facebook and Twitter were Godsends.”
Harry: “You customers are talking about you so it’s not something you can choose to ignore. It’s better to participate.”
Roger: Nine out of ten customers who complain on social media can be turned around if you engage them.
Gerd: “The beauty is that you can engage with customers directly in an efficient way. It allows us to build relationships with individuals.”
It’s the engagement that makes this channel different to any other channel we’ve had in this industry.”
Q. Getting staff to behave differently with social media.
Harry: “So far it’s just done by people within my team who have an interest in it. It’s hard to train a call centre operative and say ‘now you’re a tweeter’.
“You probably saw Carlo’ ‘I’m so over it tweet’. There’s real people doing it.
“The immediate response was ‘oh shit’. But then we thought that it was a human error, and people being real.”
Now only allow staff to be logged onto one Tweetdeck account at a time while on monitoring duty.
Gerd: “As a new brand we have licence to say we don’t serve you if you don’t have an email address and mobile number. It’s the number one source of complaint.”
“Staff self select. They wouldn’t join us if they weren’t comfortable with new technologies.”
“In our call centres we don’t use many scripts. We focus on who we hire. We let people talk to customers based on what the customer wants. They can tell whether they want a long or fast conversation. Sometimes they’ll talk about music or books if that’s what they want.”
Roger: Aggregation sites having big impact on insurance. In UK a “reintermediation takes place”. A bunch of aggregators in Australia are trying to find their places in the sun. Here two big companies, who aren’t supporting aggregators.
Gerd: Self appointed star and award givers telling us for $50k you can buy a star from us. Is anyone here from productreview.com.au? We’d love to respond to what consumers say.”
Audience questions…
Q from Ian Lyons: Managing the change process?
Harry: “Social media brings the need to respond quickly, more so even than email. We’ve been bringing back the bank manager. It’s a way of saying we really forgot what was important about having relationships. it was a really important thing we lost sight of and are serious about bringing back.”
Q. Could peer to peer lending on social networks wipe out the traditional finance industry?
Gerd: “If we as an industry do a bad job then alternatives will appear. If banks do a terrible job, alternatives will appear. Peer to peer lending only works where you have a huge population. Australia is relatively small. The challenge would be to get critical mass.”
Q. Who’s doing online banking well – why has so little changed in recent years?
Gerd: “What degree of change do customers actually want? We want to be innovative but only in response to customer demand. I don’t think they want a lot of change with their life savings. Consistency is something customers want. I think we should be a follower.”
2.50. That wraps up this panel…
Tim Burrowes
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