NAB has revealed that 45 percent of all small business lending accounts are now being opened via QuickBiz, an automated unsecured lending platform built with AWS cloud components.
The general manager of digital and sales transformation in NAB’s business and private bank division, Carmel Cauchi, disclosed the new figure in an Accenture Interactive podcast.
QuickBiz’s star has risen since its existence was first discussed back in May last year.
It has been held up in the past as both a case study for cloud-native product development at the bank and for deciding one in every three small business loans.
QuickBiz can be used to apply for unsecured loans of up to $100,000. It incorporates machine learning technology to help make decisions faster.
“[Small business customers] can be speaking to one of our small business bankers in the morning, often the credit decisioning process will take place that afternoon, and funds can be dispersed within a couple of days, so if we think about that really time-poor small business owners which are 97 percent of the Australian business market, this is a great offering for them,” Cauchi said.
“We're seeing 45 percent of our small business lending accounts being opened in this way.”
Cauchi used the podcast to talk up a range of customer experience-focused offerings that NAB is either bringing or has brought to market as part of its broader transformation journey.
She lauded NAB’s ongoing customer relationship management transformation - first revealed by iTnews earlier this year.
“We're working at the moment [to bring] in a new CRM powered by Salesforce, which has been designed for the financial services industry,” she said.
“And so for NAB, we're going from having 12 different sales/CRM systems across the group to three, which will be incredible for bringing that one view of customer and a greater omnichannel experience.”
Within her own domain, Cauchi said the establishment of “small business hubs” had enabled the bank to resolve a greater portion of issues at the first point of contact.
“It's about delivering a hallmark and a foundation of responsive service,” she said.
Cauchi noted that transformation was not just about technology; it also required cultural shifts and backing from the board down to ensure that real transformation could occur.
She also said it was important to ensure that the “core expectations” of customers were being met “before you get permission for the wow”.
“For us, we think about it in terms of being personal, being easy to do business with, being supportive and responsive,” she said.
“You have to meet that baseline expectation and that really gives you the permission to then deliver even greater experiences.”
Those experiences were starting to materialise in more parts of the bank, she noted.
“If I think about our home lending experience, I'm a NAB home loan customer, and when I renovated my house last year, I was able to speak to someone on the phone and very quickly, through internet banking, have an extension to my home loan granted, which was absolutely phenomenal,” she said.
“I now look at internet banking, and they've got a great feature embedded within internet banking, where you can look at the equity that you've got in your home loan.
“So I can put in my address and then it'll look at what the market value of that property is based on CoreLogic - a third-party ecosystem partner that we have - and then you've got prompts there if you want to do something with that equity.
“It’s a really great example of how you can be relevant, proactive, [and] there [with] the right contextualised information for when your customer wants it.
“That great insight around the equity that I have based on the current real time market value of my house … I can look at that in internet banking late at night when I'm in that channel.”
