SunTec urges UAE and GCC banks to shift towards ‘lifestyle banking’

SunTec, the world’s #1 relationship-based pricing and billing company has urged banks in the UAE and wider GCC region to re-engineer their offering and don a new avatar as a ‘Customer Lifestyle centric bank’ as opposed to being just a ‘Utility product-centric bank’.

During his presentation at the ‘EFMA World Retail banking Summit’, Amit Dua, President, and Global Head of Client Facing Groups at SunTec Business Solutions shared the strategies and accrued benefits for UAE and GCC banks by adopting this new evolved approach that utilizes the inherent data resident in the bank for customer benefit.

“For instance, it’s time for banks to move away from just being a mortgage provider to a provider of a complete home. Consumers are looking for more personalization and individual attention embedded in the experience. More customer-centric proactivity from large GCC banks and financial institutions, and a complete 360-degree approach is the need of the hour. Traditional products largely remain stagnant, with few changes to how they’ve been managed, priced, or sold,” said Dua.

SunTec Xelerate helps banks precisely address these challenges. SunTec Xelerate is a platform that is layered on top of the bank’s core system and allows for more enhanced product management, enterprise pricing, product revenue management, and ecosystem management.

“The banking industry should move towards a more holistic product management ecosystem and control over consumption and delivery: subscription models that offer transparency, dynamic bundles that allow for hyper-personalized pricing, and new service partners that expand bundled offers. For instance, if you are providing a mortgage then along with that the bank should be able to offer services that include, interior designing, landscaping, furniture, and all that the customer requires and the customer should just move into their new home with everything in place. A plug-and-play ecosystem. Banks must play on providing experience and empathy to the customer. Banks will do a great service if they can evolve and create this all-encompassed ecosystem to ensure that their business proposition remains relevant in the years to come. This will also mean additional revenue streams for them,” added Dua.

Within this ecosystem, SunTec adds value by managing the financial contracts of the partner, including revenue sharing, monetization, exposing APIs among other functionalities. For instance, a bank may offer its customers a discounted subscription to Netflix, or a similar service bundled with its banking products. The customer pays a single fee to the bank, and SunTec settles this fee directly with the partners.

It’s time to be an open organization, and SunTec is bringing this unique technology to the MENA region, that offers hyper-personalization at a level only conceptualized, but yet to be implemented in the industry. The SunTec Xelerate platform acts as an integration layer and goes beyond bank-driven personalization.

In a recent report, Celent, a leading research and advisory firm focused on technology for financial institutions, outlines SunTec Xelerate’s capabilities as a “digital innovation layer” that augments the core and enables banks to bring in ecosystem partners to offer complex bundles and products.