PegaWorld iNspire 2023: Achieving Multi-market Customer Happiness with Standard Chartered Bank

Standard Chartered's banking and financial services help businesses and people prosper across 13 countries. As the first global bank in Southeast Asia to roll out multi-market customer engagement, they understand what it takes to create amazing customer experiences. Learn how the brand is achieving hyper-customer-centric journeys and strategies across countries and brands to delight customers and optimize the organization's return on investment.

Transcript:

- Everyone, good afternoon. Great to see you all here today. So hopefully you are real excited for a great session this afternoon. I'm here to introduce this session. So, Standard Charter's banking and financial services help businesses and people prosper across 13 different countries. As a first global bank in Southeast Asia to roll out multi-market customer engagement, they understand what it means to create really exciting customer experiences. Now, the brand is achieving hyper customer-centricity in their journeys and strategies, across countries and brands, to really delight customers and optimize the organization's return on investment. To tell their story today, I'm really excited to introduce you to Khachig Kabakjian. Hopefully I've got that right. I have been practicing. Khachig is the global chapter lead of real-time customer engagement for Standard Charter Bank. And Khachig is a senior leader with over 20 years of experience in large, complex, and strategic organizations across different business domains, and is really passionate. We've had a great conversation about how excited we both get about customer engagement, so he's really passionate about real-time decisions. So this is gonna be a great session. So Khachig, I'd really like to welcome to the stage, and enjoy. Thanks Jo. All right, good afternoon everyone. I hope you can hear me okay. I was challenging Jo earlier. I said, "As long as you don't say Kardashian, okay. Say anything you want. Just don't say Kardashian, okay?" Okay, let me just spend maybe a minute for a quick introduction about Standard Chartered Bank, for those who don't know. And I thought to take a different angle. I'm not gonna talk about finances, and dollar, and number, and profit, et cetera. I took the people angle. Now, as you can see, Standard Chartered has around 83,000 employees globally. The 83,000 amazing people that we have come from over 130 countries. Now, the bank has been there for over 160 years. And, if you read the history, it's an amalgamation of two very big banks, the Standard Bank and the Chartered Bank. There's a big history there. 653 branches where we have humans, not ChatGPT, not digital channels, real humans serving customers all the time. We are present in 59 countries, which is amazing because the bank mostly operates in Asia... Sorry, Asia, Africa, and the Middle East. And if that's not a sign that this bank is really there for people to help communities or countries that are developing, I don't know what is, okay? So it's just an amazing story there. Now, it's a best employer, I think, in the last few years. It's been recognized. It's listed in multiple stock exchanges globally, and so on and so forth. But the good phrase, the good tagline that I love, that came I think around 2008, which is "Here for good." So that's the tagline of the bank, or the, I don't know what you call it, the slogan of the bank. The beauty is when that tagline came, it was the GFC time. And during that time they put this to just tell customers that we're not gonna go bankrupt. We're here. We're here for good, don't worry. But then they took this journey, and until today they use it, and actually we all started thinking or feeling that the bank is there to do good, and actually do good by their customers. So it's just an amazing story, I think. Now, one angle I wanted to look at, anyone here is fan of football or soccer? Okay, few. That's good. That's good. So the bank is the main sponsor of Liverpool FC, and Liverpool FC is one of the biggest teams or football teams in the English Premier League. And funny enough, when I joined the bank, I'm an avid Man United fan, okay? So imagine my interview with the group executive at the time where he said, "So, do you follow any sports?" And I said, "Yeah, of course. Football." And he goes, "So, any particular league?" I said, "Premier League." "So, which team do you support?" I said, "Man United." And he was like, "Don't worry, we have a strong diversity and inclusion policy in the bank, right?" So I thought this is an interesting story. And to stretch that a little bit more, last year Liverpool made a visit to Singapore and they played a friendly game. And surprisingly so, I'm not from Singapore, but I live and work there now, there were 50,000 supporters in the stadium, all supporting Liverpool except for that guy on the right, wearing a Man United jersey, and showing up to the stadium. So if it wasn't Singapore, I probably would've never walked out alive. Okay, just saying that. Now, let's come to the topic of today. Why customer centricity? And for me, I always customer centricity. I use the term as a one-to-one equivalent of centralized decisioning. Now I'll give you hopefully a resemblance that will resonate with you. I assume everyone is familiar with Airbnb. Yeah? Definitely a very easy example. Now for me, this is the very kind of powerful example of centralized decisioning. And why is that? Let's look a little bit further. What do we do with Airbnb? We simply give the platform a bit of data. So, when you're trying to book a trip or travel, you go tell Airbnb, where are you going. When are you going. How many people are going with you. You apply some filters. You say, I like an air conditioner in the apartment, or lift, et cetera, et cetera. Beautiful. You get all the data, customer data. And then Airbnb applies some analytics. So, think of the travel history. If I've booked before with Airbnb, they can look at my history. What have I chosen? What are my preferences, usually? Do I always go for, let's say a high floor, low floor, et cetera? Who am I? So they actually, if I have a profile, and of course I need to have a profile on the platform. Recently I discovered that they started asking questions that are very interesting. So, what music do you like? And you can type in some music genre. Or what's your favorite cuisine? What that helps with is they can consume that data and actually give you maybe a house that is themed based on something. And then, usually when you stay, you provide feedback and you look at the other people's feedback about the same property. And obviously they use the predictive modeling to see people like you, what apartments they have booked. So you apply the data and you apply the analytics, and then comes the beautiful decisioning, right? A centralized decisioning capability. You mix the data, you put the analytics, you put all the properties. Okay, let's for fun, call them next best properties for a moment. And then it happens in real time. Just imagine for a second that you provide all that Airbnb and press the button, and then Airbnb says, "Sorry, come back tomorrow, 'cause our batch runs overnight." Just imagine that's the experience. And then it's a one-to-one response. Now with this, and I love this example always, imagine if I'm using a segment-based platform that puts me, for example, in a good segment about people who might travel to Japan in December. And I say, I'm going to Vegas in July. And the platform says, "Oh, sorry. You're not in that segment, I can't help you." Now, post my decisioning at that moment in time, obviously on the right channel, whether it's an app, web, et cetera, comes the outcome. You book, hopefully, if the platform gives you the right property. Over time, you stay, you review the property if you like it or not, and you rebook next time if you're happy with the experience. Maybe you need some service at one point in time, you want to change a booking, you wanna update something. And last but not least, the business grows. And you as a customer grow that relationship with that platform. So it's an amazing capability that I think, if you just stretch it a bit further, it's the excellent example of real-time decisioning or centralized decisioning. Now, look at some other examples and I think these will all be familiar to everyone, okay? Uber never ever owned a car, right? They never started the business by saying, "We will purchase 1,000 cars and put them in a city." Amazon never printed books on day one. They just became resellers. They just put experience. All of them, Booking.com, Netflix, okay? When they started, they don't have cinemas, they don't have anything like that. They just invested in a very, very simple idea, that brilliant customer experience, end-to-end, centric to the customer, real time as much as possible, and then optimize and optimize continuously. So I think the example is very clear and you can see that these guys turned a website into a multi-billion dollar business, simply investing in that perfect customer experience, day in and day out. Now, what's next? I mean we keep hearing about ChatGPT and the story about generative AI. And just think for a moment. Now instead of me going to say Airbnb and say, I'm traveling on this date with my family, with my kids to that city, I'll start talking to ChatGPT and say, "Hey, I wanna plan a trip with my family maybe around July or August, and my budget is roughly around this much, and maybe I wanna go to a European city." And then ChatGPT will actually connect all these platforms and say, "Okay, your booking is on this date, and your flight can be more preferable on that particular date, or from this airport to that airport." So it's just end-to-end experience that's purely focused on that customer decisioning, or centralized customer decisioning. Now that brings us probably to the next level, now. Customer decisioning is perfect. Or centralized decisioning is perfect, but I wanna stretch that a little bit more in my domain, in my space. So, we use a platform called Real-Time Interaction Management, RTIM, which is Pega CDH, basically. And I wanna put a story that relates RTIM more to our marketing in a financial institution, in a bank. Now for those who know football, okay, great, there will be no surprises here. And if you don't, I'll hopefully give you a simple example. The kid on the left is my son, okay? He plays football. And don't judge me, but he plays in Liverpool FC Academy. Although he supports Man United. But six years ago, and this photo is old, but six years ago when we enrolled him into the academy, I still remember day one, the head coach of the club, back in Sydney actually, with North Sydney United, He said, "Kids," he's talking to the kids. He said, "In this game we have 90 minutes, it's two halves, just a 90 minute game. There are 22 players on the field. Which means on average, each one of you will get the ball for four minutes. Now, what really matters in the game is what you do in the 86 minutes in that time where you don't have the ball, you are not running, you're not gonna score, or you're not kicking the ball." And since then, this story resonated a lot with me in marketing because what we do, especially in a bank. Just think about it for a moment. You're a customer of the bank. You log into your app, or you go online banking, 9, or maybe even 99% of the time, you don't do that because you wanna buy, or you wanna get a new card, or you wanna apply for a mortgage, right? You go to the app, you are looking at your finances. You're trying to transfer some money, you pay something, you look at your salary, if it's there or not. So what matters really is what we do in all these times where you log in and you're not looking for a product. Now, for me, it's a very simple scenario. It's what we do in the 95% actually make or break our relationship with the customer. I'll flip the example one more time. At the time when the customer is ready and they walk in a branch and say, "I want a credit card," it's done, right? It's an easy sell. When you shoot your a 100 emails to your customers, and one of those emails hits the customer who's ready, it's an easy hit, okay? You did not create any science. But in the 99 times where you're hitting customers who are not interested, you just lost that customer 'cause this is just noise. This is just, you know, distracting the customer. So, bringing this now to our bank, to Standard Chartered, and we've been on the journey, I think, a bit over two years now with RTIM. I like, or I usually try to frame it in four key pillars. So, I talk about every customer in the bank. And when I say every customer I talk about existing to bank, and new to bank, should be served through a centralized brain or a centralized decisioning capability. Every channel should be connected, whether it's an inbound channel or an outbound channel, whether it's owned or paid. Now in my slide, in the bank specifically for this pillar, I always have an asterisk that says, "A roadmap evolves over time," because you can really not connect all the channels on day one, right? And then the third pillar, which is every product. This is actually very interesting because what happens over time and what I discovered even in the bank, my journey in the bank, is probably like every other organization, is very product siloed. So you talk to people in the credit cards department, or the loans, or the mortgage, investment, et cetera, they only see the world from their angle. They only see that, I want to achieve these number of cards, or these number of personal loans, and so on, and so forth. But when you bring everyone together to the table, you actually discover a lot of similarities. And that concept of doing what's right for the customer starts to click. They start to understand, when these come together, what does that mean. Actually, the power of being able to serve them all together and put the right product in front of the customer. Now, of course, last but not least, it's an always on. I call it the 24-7, right? It's an always on brain. You serve the customer anytime, anywhere, on any channel, which is very critical as well. Now, if I double-click on that, and this is one of my learnings in the bank, and Standard Charter, maybe like any other global bank or any other global organization, will have similar challenges. You sit down with different markets, I'll call them. Let's say, if I'm talking to people in Singapore or people in Hong Kong, and so on and so forth, if I start talking about data sources, they will think systems in their head. They will think about names. Or it's the ABC system or the XYZ system. And then we get into loopholes of trying to dig in and understand these systems. Instead, I try to come up with what are the key entities that I need in my decisioning? So, I need customer, for example, I need credit card transactions. I need deposit transactions. I need digital behavior. I need models, if we have models. And then what we do is we take the same box and create a version for every market, and say, "Now where do you host your credit card transactions?" And someone says, "Oh, it's XYZ platform." Perfect. Just put, in brackets, XYZ. What that helped us with is, every time we put this slide globally, okay, everyone understands what we're talking about. They can relate easily to that conversation. Of course you can see two different colors. And the idea is very simple. And I love, there was a session earlier with Wells Fargo, focusing on the data is very critical, but make sure you don't jump the gun and try to build everything in real time, okay? There's no value in that. So what we did is, obviously we started identifying what needs to be a batch data, that I can live with to come maybe on a daily basis. And what is required as a real-time data? If I use my credit card, I just need to know that immediately, maybe to put a fraud message in front of the customer, versus if you applied for a home loan, you know what, I can talk to you on the weekend or next week. It's not burning that much. And then, of course, our intelligence layer. Our brain. We call it RTIM in the bank, or you call it CDH, the layer that bring all the data, plugs in all the business rules, all the machine learning, all the AI on top of that. And because, like any other organization, or in most organizations, that brain doesn't always connect directly with the channels. We have an experience layer. So our APIs, basically, that connects us, say to the mobile app, internet banking, and outbound platforms, to say construct a nice email template or nice push message. And then last but not least, a list of channels, okay? So our RTIM, our decisioning, is simple and clear. And when I put this, although I was just mentioning to Jo, I'm a technical guy by trade, but this is a business-friendly diagram and people can easily understand, okay, how does this all come together? How can I understand, for example, if I'm gonna put an alert or a fraud message, how does the flow go, end-to-end, in front of a customer? Now, multi-brand, okay? Which is the key topic of today. So, how do I bring this to multi-brand? Now I'll give you first some challenges, and I'll tell you a little bit more about these challenges. Standard Chartered, of course, as I said, it's a global, it has multiple markets. So when I joined the bank, the bank obviously serves quite a few markets. Specifically I called Singapore, Hong Kong, India, Malaysia, UAE, and some African countries. So we're talking about roughly around 10 different markets. They all need to be served by this marketing platform. Each market, or some of these markets, are not big enough to have their own Pega platform and invest, for example, to have a data connections and APIs, et cetera, et cetera. You're talking about hundreds of thousands of dollars, if not millions sometimes. Another challenge was, when we started the journey, the bank has already signed a contract with Pega to say, "I wanna pilot two markets and see how things go." So they chose couple of markets and they thought this can be the beginning, or the MVP one. And then in parallel there was a beautiful story about decommissioning a kind of similar platform that has been on-prem, legacy, running for a long period of time. And obviously it wasn't performing as well, or as much. Now you bring all that, and for me there was a brilliant opportunity to say, "Hang on a second, why am I doing all this? Why don't I bring everything and plug it on Pega, put it on CDH, and try to serve multiple markets?" But we have only two VMs. We have only two platforms on the cloud. So my initial approach or my initial thought, again putting my probably technical hat on, I thought, I'm sure I can hack the system somehow. I can plug in some parameters and say, "If the call is coming from the Singapore app, I can pass a tag somewhere and serve it," right? But then our lovely friends at Pega, it was probably the right time, they were coming up with the idea of multi-brand. And multi-brand is simply serving the purpose that I need, which is have that platform and be able to serve more than one market at the same time using the same API. Now as I said, it just came at the right time. And we started tagging the #OneMarTech to say, you know what? Consolidate everything, it is the right time for it. Now, how does that come together, the platform setup? I just put a couple of boxes to kind of visualize it. So we used to have two instances, one serving Singapore, one serving Hong Kong. That was the beginning. And then we simply moved into this setup where we put Singapore and Hong Kong into one platform and we put India, Malaysia, and UAE into a second platform. Obviously we reviewed, like I had to go review the number of customers, et cetera. So just to make sure that we have two balanced platforms in terms of capacity, pressure, TPS, et cetera, et cetera, to be able to serve them. Now the good news is Singapore is already up and running. The platform is live and it's serving channels. The same is in India. We go live in Hong Kong in three weeks. And by end of this year, Malaysia and UAE should be up and running as well. So it's just the speed to market became phenomenal. So comparing to, I think around seven or eight months last year to roll out market number one, now we're down to average three to four months to run or implement a market. Now, how is this working? It's very simple. I took a couple of screenshots just to make sure that it is easy for everyone. Of course, we're on cloud, okay? We are on the latest version, we're on 8.8.2. We upgrade on the cloud over a weekend. Now, I've been in this space for almost 10 years, I think 8 to 10 years. When I been my previous job, I was with CBA in Australia and an upgrade project used to be six months, with maybe, I don't know, 20, 30 people working on, versus nowadays, and when I joined the bank, I think we were two versions back. I'll go on Friday home, I'll come on Monday, I'll receive an email saying, "Oh, you upgraded, congratulations. All done." It's brilliant and smooth. And for me, as a business user, I simply log into the app, I have my beautiful Man United supporter, I have my beautiful profile. In my profile, I have the setup to see multiple access groups, which means, for example, if I'm in the Singapore app in the middle, I can just flip the group and see the Hong Kong app and everything reflects after that. So the interaction history, the setup of all the next best actions, et cetera, et cetera, it's all right there, easy and clear in front of me. Now, this is all brilliant, okay, but this is all kind of technology, and thinking maybe platforms. and how they're set up. Let's look at the outcome side of this, or how did this reflect with our customers? Now, historically, as in maybe last year or the year before, I tried to do something at the beginning of my journey. I took some screenshots and I kept them in my pocket for, you know, a rainy day, as they say. You can see we used to have experiences like this with the customers, which are probably not the best. So the middle screenshot shows you that a customer received five different marketing messages in two days. And if I'm that customer, I will feel anything and everything but personalization. You're just hitting me nonstop as much as you can. You can see the push notifications on the right. These are back-to-back push messages. Sometimes they're not even correlated. So they'll ask you to do something, and they'll ask you to do something else in the next message, simply because there are two platforms sending these push messages. They don't talk to each other. Or you can see the emails where you might receive repetitive follow up on the same topic without any clue. Just hit the customer and let's see what's gonna happen. Another experience we had, or I kind of extracted is, if you look at one of the markets, and in that market you look at the app store review, you'll easily spot that when customers are complaining about the app, they usually say, "This is an advertisement app. This is not a mobile banking app." "I see too many ads in my face. Every time I log in, there's a banner in my face trying to sell me something," which is not ideal at all. Now, we moved from that, and I'm very proud and happy and excited that we moved away from that, into a world where, I'll give you an an example. Number one, we have a product called EasyPay on Balance. And EasyPay on Balance is the equivalent of convert to installments. So you have a transaction or card balance, you wanna split it into multiple installments. You can see on the left side the button that says Convert to Installment is actually powered by RTIM. And RTIM will only do that if you are eligible, if you're over a certain threshold, if all the business rules that the marketing and product team wants to apply, then that button becomes Convert to Installment. Otherwise, it's actually the e-statement button, and that's what appears to the customers. Now you can see in the middle, that block of text and button, that's actually another next best action. So we're serving multiple spots in the app, but the one in the middle actually talks about service, and maybe we figured out that you're trying to talk to us about something, we say you can do that to talk to us if you want. But the interesting part is, and when they design the app, I can't take credit for that, but when they design the new app, you can spot that things like a product suggestion, Convert to Installment, which is a sales activity, actually appears as a button, as a functionality. It's not a banner in your face trying to sell you a product. Now, the same thing applies on the one on the right side. You see that Convert to Installment. If I'm a customer, and I am a customer of the bank, more or less I see this as a function. It's like request, block the card, convert to installment, et cetera. So sits very well with the customers. Not intrusive. But at the same time achieve the expectation or the outcome. Now, I chose another example from, we have an app in India, obviously it's a different design. Different platform altogether. And I extracted three examples. So, one is super hyper-personalized on the left. So I'm talking about the banner at the bottom, which is currently served by RTIM. You can see that one is Happy Birthday, and I cannot think of anything more personal than wishing a customer a happy birthday on that particular day. Funny enough, when we deployed that, that next best action itself was built and deployed within three days. Within three days. We were visiting India and one of the senior leaders said, "I always hear about this wishing customers happy birthday. How difficult is it to do that?" And I said, "Let's give it a go. How difficult can it be?" And we literally build and deployed in three days. And the engagement on that next best action, which is the most important part. So the balance of impressions, customer saw that, and click on it to see what's gonna come up, is one of the highest ranking outcomes across all the next best actions. Now, I usually use that as my solid example to say, look, it's not about the platform, okay? I can have something built in any platform. But when I have the right context, I score. And this one is the best example, because it's my birthday, I'm interested. If I replace that with a fraud message, nobody will click, nobody will be interested, for sure. Now, the middle one is actually another great example. This is not hyper personal, it's a wish for Mother's Day. But just think that usually a bank will try to sell you a product in that space, right? And actually what will happen, or what used to happen in the bank is products will fight, and then they will actually agree, you have the top banner on personal loans. I'll give you the credit card button banner. You want investment, pre-login. You just literally split the banners amongst products. Versus now we have actually relevant messages, and more often than not, engagement messages. Now the last one is an interesting one as well. It's an invitation to register for a webinar for investment. And when we did this, this was a crazy, kind of extreme, beautiful ask from the person who runs the affluent segment in the bank. And he said, "I cannot engage with my customers easily." And I said, "Actually, we can put a banner and guide them to the beautiful webinars you guys run occasionally." Again, happened within 24 hours. Just imagine the speed and the time to market. Now, this is all good, okay? The amazing old world that we were playing through. Of course, I love this photo. I mean, used to be my boys loving Lego. Not anymore, probably. But pretty much this was the world, right? You just throw products randomly in front of the customers and you literally see an insurance one day, and you see personal loan the other day, and it's just all random messages coming in front of the customer. And I always like to call them the noise, and just literally take a minute and think. If you are in a place where it's really noisy, really, really noisy, and you stop the noise, what's gonna happen? What do you think is gonna happen? Relief. If I'm talking and we were the other day somewhere, it was very noisy and we're all screaming, right? And literally that probably applies for a minute. If you remove the noise, then you get the clarity. All I need to do is probably, I wanna run one next best action. One message to the customer that is clear and directed and useful. Now, the beautiful part about this, which sometimes people hate, is many times, or more often than not, next best action can be no action. I don't need to push a message, every time, to the customer. If there's nothing, I'll let you as a customer, go around your business, log into the app, transfer your money, and log out and think, "Actually, this was brilliant." Now, the most important element out of all this, that I personally enjoy, and I truly, truly believe that we are in the people business. We're not in banking, we're not in telco, we are all in the people business. So for me, this wouldn't have happened without an amazing team of people. So I just took some screenshots, and interestingly, there are so many more than these shots, but just an amazing bunch of people, they're all excited, they all love what they do, and they're all just engaged inside out. Now we call the team, the RTIM team, You can see the logo at the top right. And it's our internal logo. And actually the person who came up with is one of my PO's, Jay. And I love the idea of, on the left side, it's a brain actually. And on the right side it's just connections. And we say these are the channels that we're connected to. And it's really, if you see the brain is actually running all the channels. So it's just centralized inside out. Now, to wrap up, and probably to give you a nice or a better version of everything I said, I thought I'll just play a very short video That brings the story together.

- [Narrator] We live in an era of always on customer experiences. Our customers are better informed, well connected, and more expressive than ever before. And they demand faster, relevant, and personalized interactions from their banks. Disruptions in technology and global uncertainties are accelerating innovation in customer engagement as customers interact with us on their own terms. They will start their research in one place, flow across to different channels, and expect seamless experiences across the journey. To capture and maintain their attention, banks need to reinvent themselves to deliver contextual, consistent, and empathetic customer experiences. At Pega, we are excited to help Standard Chartered Bank build a new, truly customer-centric business model. The real-time interaction management, powered by Pega Customer Decision Hub, is designed to help the bank increase customer lifetime value at every interaction. Let's talk about how it will transform the way you do business. First, with Pega's always on central brain, disjointed legacy systems will be a thing of the past. Pega's enterprise-grade decisioning brain looks at the unique customer profiles and their journeys across channels to produce the next best action in milliseconds, ensuring every action is personalized and relevant, regardless of channel. Second, Pega combines predictive and adaptive analytics, business rules, and real-time data to reduce complexities and deliver intelligent, well-balanced actions at the right time to maximize the value of every interaction. Third, Pega's decisioning capability can be leveraged across the bank in new ways, such as intelligent virtual assistants, natural language processing, sophisticated fraud detection, improving case managements, and creating new collaborations, resulting in seamless end-to-end interactions and experiences. Through the positive experiences created by RTIM, customers are more likely to be attracted towards digital channels, reducing waste, promoting sustainable behaviors, and optimizing the use of our human and technology resources. With the foundation of Pega's flexible cloud architecture, intuitive UI, low-code development tools, and center out approach, the bank is well positioned to deepen relationships, maximize value, every moment, and everywhere. Standard Chartered Bank, in partnership with technology partners like Pega, will continue to lead the way in transforming customer relationships with lasting benefits. When we delight our customers, we increase the chance that they will bank with us for good.

- Thank you. Any questions? Non-finance related questions.

- [Participant 1] Khachig, thank you, That was a great presentation. I think you're a great speaker. I think you should be on the keynote next year, for sure. Yes, he is, right? I mean, give it up for him. You know, it's fascinating to hear the presentation because I was a Pega insider until very recently, and I built this great technology, my teams have built this over time, and the use case was really fascinating in terms of the next best action. And one thing I really loved what you said is sometimes the next best action is to not do anything at all, which I think a lot of people get it wrong, right? I think that's a very important one. So, one question I have from architecture perspective. You showed me the multi-market approach. Have you used a situational layer cake for building all these multiple country approaches?

- So look, the probably the shortest and very non-technical answer would be, we're using the new feature called the multi-app. And the multi-app is really a situational layer, right? You extend, so you just build another app on top of the app. So funny enough, when we started, we already had Singapore built on the older version, and then we migrated... Sorry, we upgraded, and then we just created the second app only, so the second market on top of that. But our second platform was upgraded before we started India, which is great, because now we have three independent applications altogether. You do get a massive segregation, I think I would say in 99% of the time. Now, from a business perspective, it's very kind of independent, okay? But if you look at it from a technical perspective, as in database access in the background, et cetera, it still sits in one database, and so on and so forth. So yes, it uses that, but it's more business friendly kind of setup rather than fully independent, as they call it, the multi-tenant. It's not a multi-tenant setup. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Yes.

- Yeah, yeah, sure.

- Okay, no, so let me answer it, probably, in a politically correct way, okay, if that's fine. So, I joined the bank after the bank signed up with Pega. So I wasn't part of deciding on, we're going with Pega, all right? But the reason I joined the bank is because I did Pega in a different organization, in the Commonwealth Bank in Australia. And that was one of the kind of more successful implementations, and they thought if we wanna replicate something like this, maybe we should bring people who have done it before, right? That's kind of one angle. But if you ask me personally, as I said, you can implement such a capability using an Excel sheet if needed, right? But it comes down, at the end of the day, to how easy is a product, how comfortable you are with a product, how quickly can you implement the product? Now I can tell you, because I worked in Pega from 2014, The stuff that we did in CBA, things like building strategies when you are trying to build your next best action, et cetera, things that used to take months and I used to have teams working for weeks, today on the new platform, on the next best action designer, on the one-to-one ops manager, you can do it in minutes. Now, if you're deciding now, I think you don't need to think too much, right? It's straightforward. It's out there, you can just go and do it.

- [Participant 2] So I worked closely with you in the past, and I'm pretty familiar with some of the stuff, but what I'm interested to know is since this MultiPlan has been rolled out, how are you looking to make the value realization, how you identify that, and also in terms of performance, more on the and not only on the

- Sure. So as I said, I can't share any financial numbers because these require too many approvals from too many people, as usual in a bank. But the engagement one, I think, will probably resonate with everyone. So the good thing is when we started the project, as I mentioned last year, we had a legacy platform, and it was serving an app, and there were banners and they were the same concept. There are impressions and there are clicks that you can start with your definition of engagement rate. So I took screenshots from all these dashboards and I kept them in the pocket. And our engagement rate back then was, across all the banners, across all the products, were on average around 0.1%. And what that means is one in a thousand customers will click on a banner they see. All right? Very easy. Now, when we rolled out RTIM, and we look at the first market in Singapore, I think recently, so it's been up and running for over four or five months now across everything, our engagement rate sits at 1%. That in itself is already 10 times improvement just by looking at engagement. Now when we drill down, and we did not optimize anything yet, we did not use a lot of science yet, and so on and so forth. But when we look at more customer-centric engagements, the engagement rate is at 5 to 6 to 7%. So that's automatically, you've already achieved success with the customers. The other angle that I love is, you go to the app store today, and you look at customer reviews on the app store, none of the feedbacks that has a negative evaluation has anything about bombarding me with ads. That conversation completely stopped, okay? I mean, it's not perfect. None of us have a perfect app or a perfect platform, right? People still complain. People still find things to complain about. But at least they don't complain about this area and say, "Hey stop hassling me on this." So looking forward, India by the way is even better, okay? Without sharing more numbers, but actually it's even higher in their engagement. And I'm hoping that the remaining countries will be even better because we are also learning, the bank is learning, we're all going on a journey. People will start to analyze, what actions do I need to build? So we still have the culture of, I'm moving things from an old platform to a new platform, the same product or the same engagement. Now they're thinking, okay, I can do that times 10 because I can experiment, and I can have service messages, and so on and so forth. So exciting. A lot to come. Yes.

- [Participant 3] I think you can hear me too.

- Yeah, yeah, sure.

- My voice is loud. So I second the comment about, you know, a speaker. I enjoyed your presentation.

- Thank you.

- Really hope that . My question is that, I didn't see any places to get the customer feedback. You know, it's more on the behavioral side. So how do you get that feedback of the customer. I mean, ideally they click on that. But they may be

- It's a very good question. So it has a small funny story as well. Back before in the Commonwealth Bank, when we started next best actions on the app, they all had a "Thank you" or "Click here" and they all had a "Dismiss", and they all had a remove, and I don't wanna see this again. So when we started our journey here, the first thing I told to the mobile team is, where is the dismiss button? If I'm a customer and I don't like this, how do I tell the bank back? And everyone said, "Oh, it's too late now. this design finalized, you cannot change the design." Of course on a mobile app, it's really like six months journey to be able to change the design itself of the mobile app. So what we did now, is even the design that I showed you, which is the new design, is gonna change one more time. Like literally, I think in next maybe four or five weeks, they'll release the new version, which is incorporating, for my sake, in my area, in my small space of RTIM, there will be a dismiss button. And there'll be with the dismiss options to say, "Don't show me at all." "Show me in six months." I can't remember the option, but like, give us a bit more feedback why you're not interested in this conversation. Now this is only digital. Of course we're going on internet banking, that's very easy, right? So on internet banking, we're building a form where you say "decline," you will get multi options or radio buttons say, "This is why I don't want it," and Submit, and then we will absolutely incorporate all that.

- [Participant 4] So Khachig, I have one question on multi-brand. When you're actually building the multi-brand capability, basically, you know, you have all the regions in the same instance, like three regions in the same instance. Probably the data is also lying there. How did you handle the regulatory and compliance stuff across the regions?

- Another very good question. Has a story. The good thing is I've done the implementation, so I know all the hard work that goes behind the scene, right? Believe it or not, so we started our platforms, one of them, actually currently both of them are hosted in Hong Kong. But we had that angle of saying, what if there's a regulatory requirement where India, and this is specific to India, by the way, India has a requirement that data residency, so their data should be in India. So the guys, the folks at Pega said, "Very easy. We can provision an instance and you can put India there." So we build it now in a way, thankfully, okay, we got a setup that allows us to bypass that regulation because we don't host any PII data, okay? And I know the data there says specific kind of data points, then you have to host it in India, otherwise you're okay. So we are in that form at the moment. But if we do need to do that, absolutely. I think we'll need to spin then another platform. And obviously it comes with its own cost, et cetera.

- [Participant 4] Basically go for different instances.

- You have to go for a different instance, absolutely. Yeah, but the good thing is there are choices. Like different brands, different other vendors are limited in that space. So this is another good thing, that I'm happy that the guys are working on. Even countries that are off limits, South Korea, we were talking about that, and they said, okay, we can figure it out. We can get an agreement with Amazon and give you that. So it's doable.

- Thank you.

- Cool. I know I'm between you and the party, right? So.

- [Participant 5] I just have one point actually. Because you talked about the fact that you walked into somebody who already bought Pega.

- Yes.

- [Participant 5] I kind of wanted to understand, did that make a difference to the kind of transformation that you needed to take people on the journey of, you know, how do people react? Because, you know, there's some brilliant examples there of what not to do. Was there more that you had to do than show screens?

- Many, many, many, many sleepless nights? Yes. I would say absolutely. Absolutely. And that's why I kept saying, probably, at the beginning, we are in the people business, okay? You are not really, we're not technical people. We're in the people business. So one story I can tell probably, and hopefully it'll resonate. When this platform, when we started the implementation, January last year, the mobile team building the new mobile app, these guys said, "If you wanna serve a next best action, you have six weeks, okay? And within six weeks you have to have an API that returns a response that displays something in the app." Everyone on this side, in my team, technology, everyone said, "Are you crazy? No way on Earth. Let's be out of the mobile app." I said, "If we are out of the mobile app, we lost 80% of the customers and our presence and fame." Okay, so how do you do that? I sent an email back to the mobile team and I said, "Committed. We will have the first instance," et cetera, et cetera. Team freaked out, everyone's crazy. You're crazy, this will never happen. Guess what happened, eight weeks after that, or can't remember, six to eight weeks after that, we have the first use case in the test environment ready to be tested, okay? Worked. The mobile team says, "We're gonna do a cut freeze on the code. You should have 26 use cases by two months," or something. Now everyone in team looked at me and said, "You're gonna send the email, aren't you?" I said, "I will. We're doing this, okay. There's no way back." We jumped in. And believe it or not, when people approached this, or people approach anything with a positive attitude, guess what? More often than not, it happens. Now, was it perfect? Maybe not. When we signed the 26 use cases, and I don't know, Sandeep or Moan will remember this story, right? When we ,at the beginning, said 26. When we came to go live four months after that, and the mobile app was delayed two months at one point, and we said, that's fine, we're ready. The number 26 was totally different in the end, okay? But it was just at the beginning, an argument, or probably a bargain to say, we will kick you out. But when you commit, guess what? People say, you know what, don't worry. 26, 24, 20. As long as we have something up and running, that's fine. And then we continue the journey, and people believed in it, and yeah, we are here today. Cool, I don't wanna stop you from going and having drinks and partying and dancing in the disco, so thank you so much for your time. Really appreciate it.