3. Digitize commercial banking offerings and automate processes (continued) Digital solutions like these allow employees to focus on higher-value or Without extensive digital offerings, commercial banks need to consider more complex customer inquiries. Using a network of integrated services ways to handle large volumes of inquiries, credit applications, and and solutions, one of the largest banks in China added a “Coronavirus requests for support. Applying a three-month repayment break to a zone” to its mobile app to support customers who wanted up-to-date portfolio of 100,000 loans, for example, could take many hours of information on the spread of the virus, online counselling, and searches manual effort and could, if the process is not well enforced, documented for available hospital beds. These services were offered alongside special and controlled, significant increase the operational risk. Instead, access to financial services, such as COVID-19 insurance policies, credit introducing automation could help a bank redirect human effort to more cards with interest-free periods, and facility extensions for existing loans. valuable customer engagements. A large Australian bank did just that, In one month, the “Coronavirus zone” had over 100 million visits with integrating its digital marketing platform with robotic process more than a million people receiving online counselling. Many of those automation to apply repayment holidays and extend existing facilities for who downloaded the app had no previous affiliation with the bank. specific customer segments. 12 Copyright © 2020 Accenture. All rights reserved.