You can take a virtual tour of your new home even as you complete a mortgage transaction for it over your smartphone. Or you can drive into a parking lot and tell your connected car to make a payment for two hours of parking. You can do the same thing when you hit your local drive-through for a thin-crust pizza. And your intuitive voice banking system will remind you to top up your Salik account, or that your rent cheque will be presented in a few days so an overdraft may be in order.

All this is stuff that sci-fi movies are made of; sorry, were made of — most of this is now as real as the bank branch located two blocks away from your home. Technology continues to transform the way we bank. And buzz words like ‘digital first’ and ‘mobile first’ are all great things. However, in my view, the biggest priority is ‘customer first’.

The human touch needs to precede and follow each interaction with technology. As bank customers experience digital and advisory banking at Emirates NBD’s futuristic banking space in the Museum of the Future at Emirates Towers, they get to understand and influence how banking will adapt to the future. When we combine the best of digital fintech with a human touch, it shows in the intuitive design of every banking experience, starting with the ATM screen.

High-tech meets high-touch

This ‘high-tech meets high-touch’ approach is the reason why there is a sofa instead of a chair in the branch’s advisory zone. It is why the bank gives the customer a higher level of privacy, and why the collaborative design allows a family to sit together and discuss their financial future while interacting with their bank.

Someone asked me what the most exciting thing at our new futuristic branch at Emirates Towers is, hoping to hear more about Pepper, our humanoid robot who greets customers as they enter the branch, reads their emotions and chats with them happily. Pepper is great fun and, understandably, a headline-grabber.

However, as a digitally innovative bank, it is as crucial that our adoption scorecard for vendors and customers matches each new technology that we introduce. So, my answer was: customer experience is the most exciting aspect. While we aim to bring banking to the screen of your mobile phone, the 4,094-square-foot branch is designed with customers at centre stage, as opposed to being squeezed under the mall escalator withdrawing cash.

Digital is inevitable, analog is the differentiator

Bank customers, especially here in the UAE, are early adopters of technology and the smartest of smartphone users; so going digital is inevitable. But as the world becomes more digital, analog will become the differentiator.

Today, 90 per cent of Emirates NBD’s transactions are outside the branch. Which makes it all the more important to ensure that the 10 per cent conducted in the branch are an excellent experience. Our customer uses online and mobile banking most of the time; the one day she decides to visit her branch, she’d better have an experience that is richer and more fulfilling than the one online.

Digital banking may be the future, but for it to work, it cannot be an either or solution. If the future of banking is about making the customer more empowered, it needs to reach them through multiple always-on channels. The customer should be able to log in to a website, tap smartly on a mobile device, walk into a branch and meet the manager, integrate banking into the mall experience through kiosks, withdraw cash at ATMs, or even chat with a banker using voice and video.

This is the reason why, alongside being digital innovators, Emirates NBD still serves the best kahwa and dates in town to customers at many branches.

It is our constant endeavour to innovate for the customer’s benefit rather than for accolades. And, more importantly, to continue to study our customers’ financial behaviour and track their financial journey in order to ensure that we are constantly at their side — available 24|7, as it were — when a transaction or interaction is necessary.

And that, really, is the core of responsive banking: to understand every single type of customer’s disparate needs and to provide solutions that come not only from the latest tools available to us as bankers, but also from envisioning how future needs will evolve and to invest in creating those solutions.

— Suvo Sarkar, Senior Executive Vice-President & Group Head — Retail Banking & Wealth Management at Emirates NBD.