Andreea Voinea, BCR: Banking will remain a business made by people for people, improved by data and technology

Company executives look at the current period as an opportunity, not a threat. Whether we are talking about automation or digitization, reviewing sales models, what we have noticed is an acceleration of change processes to cope with the new context, said Andreea Voinea, HR Director at BCR at Business Review’s #futureofwork – Working Romania HR Conference.

”Visionary leaders embark on this change without clinging to the past and, in order to make things different, they give free rein to employees’ creativity,” says Andreea Voinea.

“To structure the priorities in which we invest our energy and resources, we look at four directions. Firstly, we need to understand the impact that this change in behaviors has our customers. Secondly, we must redesign the business model, accelerating or changing certain processes. Thirdly, and very important, it is the area of technology: how we prepare the organization for this new technology cycle, what investments need to be made in the context in which most companies are faced with restrictive profitability.”

“Fourthly, how do we prepare our people to support and promote the change we are going through. At BCR, the crisis caught us at a good time, we were in the full process of digital transformation and we aimed to move many of our daily banking processes in the digital area, so that our people have more time for advisory services, having more time to spend with our customers, better understanding their needs and coming up with customized solutions, acting as trustful long-term partners to them”.

“So, about 80-90 percent of daily banking processes could already be done through George, already a year ago. Being able to do it remotely made it relatively easy for us to keep in touch with customers. It was a major step in changing the business model. It is important to say that we managed during the pandemic to capture the largest retail lending share in the market and, at the same time, to have the highest increase in the Customer Satisfaction Index, 8%. The crisis helped us to improve our services and became more accessible and easier to use. Also during this period, forced by circumstances, we explored new business models, such as remote contact center and remote advisory, models that went well and that we will expand in the future. Now, in George, we are working to extend all the retail facilities we have to the corporate clients.”

“All these steps are correlated at the industry level. All banks are trying to move their day-to-day operations to the digital wave, so that the advice and guidance area for customers on how to make financial choices in their lives remain in the branches. People ask us if we will have fewer staff: no, we will not have fewer people, the business model means making time more efficient in order to have a better relationship with our customers.”

“We think we couldn’t do anything without our people. Interaction with customers, whether physical or digital, will continue to be very important for maintaining a long-term relationship of trust. My opinion is that the essence of our business is trust. Banking will remain a business for people made by people, which is improved through the usage of data and technology. We are in another cycle now, another moment, it is a major, accelerated qualitative leap, which forced by circumstances we made in 2020 and 2021. And this is not only happening in banking, I am convinced that similar examples exist in all industries,” concludes Andreea Voinea.