Banks must put the customer at the heart of what they do, says AAZZUR

4 FEB 2021

AAZZUR emphasised the importance of putting the customer at the centre of banking services for the future at this year’s Plug and Play Fintech Europe Expo 2021.

CEO Philipp Buschmann and CFO Martin Damaske spoke during day one of the event, which was organised by the world’s largest innovation platform, Plug and Play.

AAZZUR was asked to speak about UI/UX innovation as a graduate of the Plug and Play accelerator programme and due to the revolutionary work it’s done on customer centricity in banking.

“The banking industry has a big challenge in the sense that the entire banking value chain has been unbundled,” Philipp told other industry leaders.

“And that means there have been a lot services – whether that’s lending, whether that’s lending or cards and accounts. All over the place, where there are a lot of specialised companies but they are unbundled, so there are a lot of different apps.

“Now there’s a rebundling of that, that’s happening currently in banking. What AAZZUR is doing to address these challenges, or improve these services, is to connect banks to a platform to which other fintech services are connected.

“Then we look at the bank transaction data – your data – to see what your problem is today. Are you getting married? Are you buying a car or house? Are you going on holiday? And based on that data, we can then make information or products available to the end customer, through our platform.

“At a minimum, we can create some triggers based on data and at a maximum, we can build an entire new banking service on top of our platform.”

CFO Martin also spoke about how open banking and PSD2 are driving the customer-centric revolution in banking.

“The core drivers of open banking from our point of view are that data becomes more broadly available. That’s very good, so behind that is that data will be analysed and analysed in the way that provides a customer benefit and that is all around personalisation.

“The customer doesn’t want to be a standard customer of a bank. He wants to get some individual, some personal services and some personal recommendations. Whereas perhaps in early years. He thought he’d get it at the branch, now this moves through data analysis, into the digital space.”

As for the future, “the bank has to become more customer centric”, Martin added.

“So the challenges we are seeing in the industry – that is exactly where are positioned – is to support the incumbent banks to move forward; to incorporate new ideas, new working business models into their large infrastructure and their larger business approach.

“Putting some tech like AAZZUR will make them more flexible on the front-end, be more customer centric and be able to really address the needs of some segments within their entire user base.

Plug and Play Fintech Europe Expo 2021 took place entirely online from Frankfurt on January 27-18. For more information about the event, visit the Plug and Play website.

To watch the discussion, go to the Plug and Play’s YouTube page.

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