„Mobile bank” strategy

Adoption of new strategy implies a closure and summary of the “Mobile Bank” strategy, pursued since 2016. It was built on 3 pillars: Empathy, Mobility and Efficiency. Our strategic initiatives and operations focused on clients. We developed our competitive advantage in the mobile area. We continue to improve the resources management.

Empathy is a quality that is rarely associated with the financial sector. We use various tools to instil it in our organisational culture, our employees’ mindsets, and our processes and products. Empathy helps us provide better customer service, improves relations with our partners, and enhances cooperation among our employees. We make sure our products and services meet four core requirements applied whenever we interact with our customers. The requirements include:

People are at the core of our empathy-related vision and strategy. That is why we provide our employees with know-how and indicate a course of direction for the bank’s development. Every three months, the Management Board holds open staff meetings which are broadcast for everyone interested. Their objective is to comment on results, discuss strategic projects, and answer questions. We encourage our employees to visit other places in the company for quick “work experience”. Employees gain work experience in places where the bank meets customers: in retail and corporate branches, and the contact centre.

For over five years we have been implementing the rules of simple and empathetic communication in mBank under the “mKanon” project. We believe that good and effective communication is clear, informative, brief, correct in terms of language, honest, empathic and conveyed using the first-person perspective. In the first place we have changed communication in the call centre and the complaint-handling team, i.e. areas directly communicating with clients. We have made changes in internal communication in the bank, including the compliance, internal legislation, and security areas. We organise workshops for employees during which we teach them how to write to clients experiencing difficult time, e.g. clients subject to debt collection or whose relative has died. We try to increase employees’ awareness in this respect by cooperating with ambassadors of mKanon (rules of clear, transparent and simplified communication). The group consists of 120 employees who help their co-workers to communicate more effectively. In 2019 we trained approximately 840 employees and organised 32 workshops. Fundacja Języka Polskiego (the Polish Language Centre) audited our communication and awarded measures taken by mBank with a language quality certificate. The President of the Management Board signed a regulation implementing the standard on internal communication in mBank.

To promote empathy at mBank, we take, among others, the following measures

After the verification of the best solutions available on the market, we selected a provider and launched the platform for managing electronic documentation (ECM, Enterprise Content Management). We are migrating data and reducing the scope of existing document repositories. The first migrations were successful. Further migrations and deactivation of repositories are planned.

In the IT area, goals in the field of effectiveness were defined in the Effect programme. Within the programme, we focused on optimising the infrastructure use. Last year, we successfully consolidated data centres. We increased the utilisation of current resources (mass storage and servers) and optimised the resource purchasing process. Moreover, under the Effect programme, software must be developed so as to only use the required infrastructure capacity and manage efficiency well. Thanks to these activities, we reduced the IT costs growth rate more than twice. Additionally, changes made to the infrastructure have made its maintenance easier. Moreover, it enhanced infrastructure security and efficiency.

In parallel to increasing effectiveness in Operations and IT, a project aimed at creating a single data warehouse has been implemented at the bank in the recent years. Thanks to these efforts, Common Data Layer (CDL), a single platform containing detailed data from the areas of corporate banking, retail banking, and brokerage operations, was established. CDL functions as a data warehouse, which uses a logical relational data model to link data from key areas of the bank, such as the general ledger, client data, contracts, agreements, products etc. All data warehouse users can apply uniform definitions of terms available in CDL thanks to the Dictionary of Business Terms. We strive to ensure a high level of CDL data correctness. To this end, we have developed relevant quality principles in cooperation with the Data Quality Management (DQM) project team, which is responsible for enhancing data quality in the whole organisation.

In 2019 we continued our systematic development of the mobile application. During this time, mBank provided 15 application updates, which confirms the organisation’s ability to make agile changes and respond to customer expectations. The work on the application was mainly focused on improving usability and communication as well as sales activities.

More information on mBank’s mobile app can be found in section “Innovativeness is who we are”.

mBank Group financial aspirations and their achievement in periods allowing for comparison to the sector are presented in the table below. The reference base is understood as the peer banks listed on the WSE.