CIMB wins MTEA for Robotics – Financial Services

The new commercial lending journey offers greater efficiency, transparency, and security to CIMB’s customers.

The COVID-19 pandemic has prompted financial institutions to serve their customers in ways that adhere to health and safety considerations such as social distancing. In line with this new way of operating and the accelerated digital adoption, CIMB Group Holdings Berhad (“CIMB” or “the Group”) has launched digital platforms and solutions in line with its focus on Customer Centricity under the Group’s Forward23+ strategy. One of these platforms is the CIMB Biz Financing Portal (“BFP”) that offers convenience for its small and medium enterprise (“SME”) customers in Malaysia to apply for various loans or financing facilities entirely online.

CIMB’s BFP was specially created for SMEs as part of the Group’s effort to transform its Commercial Lending journey to benefit its customers. Paperless solutions such as BFP are aimed at making CIMB’s banking offerings more easily accessible. They also provide safety and convenience by leveraging digital capabilities aided by robotics and process automation to enhance customer experience. Launched in July 2020, CIMB’s BFP enables SME customers to upload documents and submit loan applications entirely online, providing convenience by eliminating the need to visit a branch.

Another platform introduced by CIMB in Malaysia as part of its effort to digitise financial services is the Amazing Customer Experience (“ACE”) mobile productivity tool, which enables the bank’s Commercial Relationship Managers (“RMs”) to work anywhere, anytime. ACE assists RMs through various features such as lead funneling, lead management, knowledge injection, pre-screening from quantitative credit databases, and digitised forms. ACE also supports better customer interaction and decision support through the automation of data entry into the bank’s Business Credit System (“BCS”) for loan origination via Robotic Process Automation (“RPA”). ACE has also enabled pre-screening of customers through the simplified debt-service coverage calculator that only requires minimal input. As ACE automates the time-consuming data entry process, RMs have become more self-assured and are able to focus on value-adding services such as customer engagement and advisory tasks.

ACE also features automated notifications for clients, providing greater transparency throughout the loan application process. As RMs are able to securely refer to customer information and create loan applications through any ACE-enabled portable device, CIMB ACE has resulted in improved speed, efficiency, transparency, convenience, and confidence in its customer relationships. This initiative to improve the commercial lending process has been recognised in the Robotics – Financial Services category of the Malaysia Technology Excellence Awards 2021.

CIMB ACE has resulted in the following achievements (as at Dec 2020):

• Customer experience improved as the platform features auto-triggered SMS notifications to customers during the loan application process. This is to provide more transparency throughout the application process, which has resulted in the customer satisfaction score improving by 17% year-on-year, from 3.5 to 4.1 as at Dec 2020.
• Within the bank, ACE revolutionised employees’ experience through robotic process automation. This initiative significantly reduced backend manual data entry. As a result, Relationship Managers were able to spend more time on what matters most, i.e. CIMB’s customers, and the RM satisfaction score improved by 22% year-on-year, from 2.7 to 3.3 as at
• Dec 2020.
• Besides satisfaction scores, ACE also resulted in measurable efficiency gains:

- Credit turnaround time (the time taken to approve the customer’s application) was reduced by >55%

- Rework rate (the percentage of cases returned from the credit team to the sales team for clarification) was reduced by >50%

With encouraging results such as these, CIMB will continue to introduce value-adding digital solutions such as BFP and ACE to improve customer experience.

Today, CIMB is one of ASEAN’s leading banking groups and Malaysia’s second largest financial services provider, by assets. Listed on Bursa Malaysia via CIMB Group Holdings Berhad, it had a market capitalisation of approximately MYR43.5 billion as at 31 December 2020. It offers consumer banking, commercial banking, wholesale banking, transaction banking, Islamic banking and asset management products and services. Headquartered in Kuala Lumpur, the Group is present in all 10 ASEAN nations (Malaysia, Indonesia, Singapore, Thailand, Cambodia, Brunei, Vietnam, Myanmar, Laos and Philippines). Beyond ASEAN, the Group has market presence in China, Hong Kong, India, South Korea, the US and UK. CIMB has one of the most extensive retail branch networks in ASEAN with 668 branches and around 34,000 employees as at 31 December 2020. The Group’s investment banking arm is one of the largest Asia Pacific-based investment banks, while it offers comprehensive research coverage of around 950 stocks in the region via its CGS-CIMB joint venture.