Building Societies Annual Conference #BSA150

Last week we attended the BSA Conference in London. It was great to receive lots of new interest in what we're doing and how we can help. Here's a short summary...The main themes of the event were efficiency, customer service, differentiation, and cost controls. In discussions in the exhibition halls, we also heard a lot about the growing scepticism towards large digital transformation programmes. Many building societies are focusing instead on smaller, more agile projects, which deliver real benefits quickly and at low cost.

Speakers focused on the opportunity building societies have to differentiate themselves from banks by improving customer service through technology rather than simply using technology to replace human interaction. With banks sacrificing customer service to cut costs there is an opportunity for building societies to use smart tech to automate back office and processing tasks and reallocate resources to managing customer relationships and to leverage the customer intelligence technology is providing.As well as exhibiting, Nivo spoke in an interesting session, Digital Mutual - The Next Big Thing.

This was an opportunity to see and hear about some of the new products and systems set to hit the market, and featured new innovations and ideas from 10 firms, the format was a 4-minute elevator pitch.Pitches showcased services using AI in advice, customer on boarding and paperless documentation. The speaker line up included: DPR Group, Festina Finance, Hyland, ieDigital, Nivo, Sopra Banking, Opus Trust Communications, Thoughtonomy, Unisys and Uinsure.

The Nivo Pitch

Mat Elliott from Nivo was first up, highlighting the benefits of reducing onboarding time, whilst at the same time removing paper and moving away from unsecure emails.Mat addressed concerns about cost and speed of implementation head on - Nivo is free to set up and can start to be used in minutes, with no technical work required. The picture shows Mat talking about financial firms typically taking 48 days to onboard a customer - involving 60+ data fields, 29 emails and 4 different channels - the result being a drop out rate of over 80%. Mat mentioned that using Nivo, some Credit Union clients have cut the processing of customer applications to 15 minutes.

Three other firms attracted our attention during the pitch:

Sopra Banking Software - Sopra spoke about Building Societies using its technology to build closer relationships, supporting online conversations with customers and extending those conversations to onboarding (using Nivo’s instant messaging platform).

Festina Finance - Festina brings AI to advising on financial products like mortgages. It supports online conversations, using AI to establish a customer’s level of understanding and requirements before highlighting specific products. More than 25% of Denmark’s population is using Festina’s service.

Uinsure - Uinsure pitched Building Societies offering Home Insurance with every mortgage sale, with no additional work. By connecting APIs to capture information from mortgage applications and information from trusted data sources, Uinsure is able to offer a zero question home insurance product.

Many thanks to the BSA for an interesting and busy event.