Sandeep Mohapatra: the idea worth carrying forward

The pandemic has truly accelerated the march to digital transformation, right? And we're seeing years of change being condensed into a few months. But I think what we are fundamentally seeing is that the society is entering into something called an isolation economy. And that fundamentally challenges the social or the sharing economy in which we usually operate. What it means for us as banks, it means that some people, there is an underlying fundamental change that some people might be reluctant to come to physical engagements and some might not even ever come back. Now, yet the physical network remains particularly challenging to shift online. And one should not be tempted actually to believe that the physical network will cease to exist.

That's not going to happen. So the question therefore is in what shape, size or form should the physical networks be re-architected, right? Or the branch network should be present. And we thought long and hard about it. And we thought the future fit, we had to completely reimagine this model and to create a truly hybrid of an offline and an online model. And we thought that's the best way forward. So when COVID hit us and we were thinking about the physical network, which remains to be the largest footfall area for a branch, we wanted to truly marry the best of the digital world and the physical world and create a truly cohesive hybrid, which we call the fidgetal strategy. So that was the core of our strategy.

Now we wanted to move away directionally from the traditional branch based banking, where the focus of the branch is based as transaction hubs and move away to focus the human energy on truly value added things like deepening relationships, getting new relationships, like delivering specific high value transactions and act as orchestrators of a digital core. And in a truly complementary fashion, we wanted digital to be interlaced into the physical network entirely. And we didn't just want to do it in the form of a kiosk or a tablet somewhere. We didn't want that. We wanted it to be humanized. We wanted therefore to interlace emerging things such as artificial intelligence, machine learning, internet of things into this whole space.

And that's how the whole idea of, I think, the opportunity space of Abbey came up. So what we call Abbey is basically a digital personal banker. It's an extremely smart assistant, which is powered by artificial intelligence. It's got tech such as face recognition, such as voice commands, autonomous navigation, swift self-service, etc. So we started re-imagining this model and we brought it out to life last year. I think it was around August. So in all the APSA branches today, you either see a humanoid or you see a tablet as the first point of interaction to a branch. And like I said, we wanted to really create that humanized experience. So when you stand in front of it, you could just say, hi, what's all, how can I help you today?

And it started doing a lot of transaction processing, which your branch was doing. Then we said, okay, how do we move now, Abbey outside of the branch and to the customer's pocket? So we hooked on to the world's largest social media messenger, i.e. WhatsApp, and we brought Abbey to life there. And so you can practically bank as you chat. And both these initiatives were widely appreciated in Mauritius. They were the first in Mauritius and it created a huge vibe. But more importantly, we also thought that we should take this pandemic as an opportunity to see how, in spite of physical networks, we can still do business. And digital onboarding while it was playing on our mind, but the central KYC is not yet in place in Mauritius, it's being built.

But we said, hey, why not take Abbey there and use the same face recognition technology, the voice recognition technology, the chat, NLP capabilities to onboard customer and to do digital KYC entirely outside. So the customer just goes ahead, uploads the picture, the picture is snapped, the face ID is done, and the face is matched and it's a match. So you go ahead. So we solved for the digital onboarding problem. Then we saw the businesses being struck with COVID and they were disrupted badly, the SMEs especially. So we introduced the business banking app for our customers to business banking customers and SME customers to be on the go. We introduced contactless

cards and we introduced for large corporates for their fast payments to suppliers, both local and international. We introduced something called a host to host solution. All of these mammoth efforts where we're hugely recognized both by the industry, by different fraternities. And I think we won a won a large list of awards. If I had to summarize, I think going in a world that is becoming less physical, but not yet entirely digital. I think that the trick is to find the right mix for digital strategy. How do we interlace, repurpose, reorient physical networks to be more efficient, more secure, more round the clock, but most importantly, more humanized?