Scotiabank Peru is the country’s second largest financial institution with over $1bn in revenue, more than four million customers and 10,000+ employees. When Senior Vice President & Chief Digital Officer Lucho Torres joined the bank in 2016, the concept of digital banking in Peru was in its infancy. It was his mission to leverage the trust in a global banking leader founded in 1832 and lead a transformation to create “the most relevant, simple and fast digital bank for consumers and businesses” across the country.
“The challenge was to build a digital bank with scalability and sustainability,” he recalls. “We have created a customer-centric value proposition by building and taking to the market our own digital platforms and financial products to deliver personalised and intuitive customer experiences.”
Changing the consumer banking culture
“In early 2017, we began the project we call ‘JOY’ – to build our own mobile and online banking platforms. We had to replace a legacy system with its out of date user experience,” recalls Torres. “By the end of 2018, we launched a new platform. To do so, we worked with over 1,400 customers through workshops, design thinking and user testing. These interactions helped us build the foundations of what the experience should and could be for our customers using digital channels.”
With the growth in digital adoption set to continue, Torres expects Scotiabank´s customers and business to be entirely digital 12 to 18 months from now.
Continuous Improvement in Digital Banking
Torres cautions that positive transformations like this take time and that the focus should not be on short-term results when adopting a new culture requires the patience to truly disrupt business outcomes.
“It’s important to set the right expectations in terms of how long it takes to build a new team, nurture a new culture, introduce agile methodologies and establish new ways of working,” he says. “And of course, delivering products and scaling the businesses in a rapid way. We aim to do this incrementally with an agile approach – focusing on smaller chunks of continuous improvement along the timeline.”
