Year of Mobility
For Alior Bank, 2019 was the year of mobility. Intense work of our whole team focused on increasing customers’ comfort and independence in the everyday use of banking products and services. We achieved our goal, which was the development of a modern and intuitive banking available for each customer at any time. The number of Alior Mobile app users increased during the year by close to 85%.
For us, the priority had been to provide support in our customers’ migration to the digital world, which was successfully completed in the spring of 2019. Later on, the success of our efforts to create a user friendly mobile application was confirmed by high customer ratings in AppStore and Google Play, as well as the double-digit growth rate of Alior Mobile customer group. On the other hand, redesigning the transaction service in the Alior Online electronic banking to make it more intuitive resulted in over 860k our customers using it actively at the end of Q4.
Alior Bank’s activities in this field were also appreciated by the prestigious ranking of the Newsweek weekly magazine, which awarded us the title of Newsweek Friendly Bank for our online banking and mobile application.
First Choice Bank
Our efforts have borne fruit - we are the first choice bank for a growing group of customers. During the year, the number of new savings and settlement accounts with a systematic increase in growth of 65%. The number of ROR from transactions also increased - here we recorded over 60% growth.
All these numbers prove that customers put their trust in us and gladly treat us as a bank with which they want to take care of their finance every day. It is something I am proud of. The Bank Customers Satisfaction Monitor 2019, a cyclical survey conducted by ARC Rynek i Opinia, shows that the Net Promoter Score for our Bank grew from 28% in 2018 to 36% in 2019. This places us among the three banks with the highest increase in this survey.
In the Vanguard of Innovations
We utilised the entry into force in September 2019 of the Union’s PSD2, which sanctions the functioning of open banking, to develop our business - and it has already borne fruit. Implementation of a simplified credit process, which allowed as many as 26 million customers of other banks to apply for a loan with us without having to present a statement of earnings, influenced Alior Bank Group Management Board’s Report 2019 comprising Alior Bank S.A. Management Board’s Report our sales immediately. We granted first loans using this very process in the first month of the service being available.
In our search for new solutions for our customers we also reached for technology and tools available in the market. The acceleration programme run by our innovation lab RBL_Innovation by Alior Bank enables us to cooperate with startups and FinTechs from all over the world. Alior Bank is an attractive partner for entities interested in implementing their solutions in Poland, which is proven by over 300 applications in the two accelerator editions. According to Global Finance Magazine, our lab counts among top 25 in the world. It is a big honour for us, especially as it took us only two years to achieve this position.
Lately, our venture capital fund has invested in the Polish RegTech Autenti, a platform for online contract signing and document exchange and authorisation both for personal customers as well as enterprises, institutions and corporations. In 2020, we plan further transactions with Central and Eastern Europe companies operating in FinTech, InsureTech and RegTech sectors.
Technology for Effectiveness
Alior Bank is in the vanguard of global banking also because of its use of a durable medium with a public blockchain. We belong to a small group of institutions from all over the world which developed such a solution entirely on their own. Our durable medium facilitates authentication of public documents we provide to our customers, such as rules and regulations or schedules of fees and charges. It is a transparent and easy-to-use tool compliant not only with the regulatory requirements, but also with the idea of ecology. It allowed us to eliminate the necessity of sending documents in paper form, thus leading to real savings.
Technology is certainly one of the key factors increasing our effectiveness. But not the only one. Through constant improvement and simplification of processes, organisation and work methods, we utilise available resources better and better. Today at Alior Bank, we work with 100 robots supporting our customers and us in everyday banking.
I know that the next year will also bring a great many challenges. At the turn of 2019 and 2020, we already introduced a new branch format which changes the form of customers’ contacts with a bank branch entirely. It is modern, because today bank branches support the whole IT infrastructure comprising for instance online and mobile banking, online loan applications and automated decisions, and even ATMs and CDMs. But most of all, our branch is a place where we meet with customers, meant to ensure maximum comfort and privacy, because we talk about matters that are truly important for our customers. Just in 2020, we plan to create 30 such modern branches.
2020-2022 Strategy. More than a Bank
We start to implement our new strategy for the years 2020-2022. Once again in the history of our Bank, we are going to set a new standard in the financial services market and reveal to our customers an entirely new banking dimension. Today, our goal is not only to provide banking services. We want to achieve more - to make our customers’ lives easier.
Responding to our customers’ needs and expectations, we have created a strategy of an organisation that stays close to its customers every day. We combine traditional banking functions and these of a highly personalised digital bank with non-banking services to provide our customers with an absolutely new quality.
Every our effort in the fields of product, technology and organisation will be subjected to the improvement of customer experience. Mobile app development, new implementations of innovative solutions, close cooperation with reliable partners, including tech companies, and simple processes will make us a bank that will accompany customers and help them in everyday life, at its various stages and in various moments.
We set ourselves ambitious goals, but I am sure we will achieve them. Once again we will prove that for us nothing is impossible.
Alior Bank’s successes result from the efforts of the whole team. I want to thank all our employees for their commitment and creativity in their daily work. Together, we will provide customer experience that soon will allow to describe us as “more than a bank”, and thus we will fulfil the promise made in our new strategy.
