Dubai: After 50 years of business, Mashreq attributes its success to the ability of its leadership to continuously foster change and adapt quickly to the new markets as they emerged in the country, Mashreq CEO Abdul Aziz Al Ghurair told Gulf News.
“And our model will continue to change. I believe we will see the same quantum of change that we saw over the past 50 years, in the next 5 years. Speed is the success factor in adapting to new trends and technology, and the new customer preferences, which dictate what kind of business model they want,” Al Ghurair said.
And continual change has been part of Al Ghurair’s history in the bank. He took over as Mashreq’s CEO as a young man of 35 in 1991 and when the business model had everything happening in the branch from client relations to fulfilment. He first centralised the back office and then segmented the business into retail, corporate, and international. “Each were completely different segments with different needs, so we built a segment focus rather than the branch and manager focus that we had in the past,” he said.
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Technology has also played a vital part in the changes. In the past every customer had to come to the branch so the bankers had a chance to exchange ideas. But today 85 per cent of Mashreq’s customer transactions are outside the branch. “And this was deliberate choice because we wanted to make it convenient for the customer. All these transactions can be done from a distance,” Al Ghurair said.
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“Therefore the bank needs intelligent systems that can really reach out to the customer, through data mining, looking at customer behaviour, what they like and do not like; and what they might need from the bank. It is critical that we have the customers’ email, mobile and office numbers, which is how we communicate with our clients,” he said.
Banking Federation
Al Ghurair has been chairman of the UAE Banking Federation for four years and takes pride in the way its role has evolved as a collaborative platform where banks are willing to work together and support the banking system, and the economy, and work with our regulator to improve the banking environment, and protect the customers’ money.
“We have overcome the previously limited cooperation between the banks and we have 18 different committees in the UAE Banking Federation dealing with specialist areas. We know it is in our mutual interest to protect and put in the right checks and balances. For example, last week we announced a platform to share information on fraud so banks can share information and see how this fraud took place.
“We are also sharing experience on cyber-security issues [this interview was before the recent ransomware attacks] which is major challenge for the world. There is an agreement among all the CEOs that this is critical and there is nothing competitive about this information. A cyber-attack on any single bank is an attack on the entire UAE banking system. So we all realise that this is time to work together and we are willing to share and to fund the platform with technology that makes the information transfer seamless because this information should travel very fast. I don’t want a fraud or cyber-attack to happen and I get to hear about it a month later. It should be instantaneous that this information travels to all the banks,” said Al Ghurair.
